Ericsson strengthens its agreement for 5G research and development with NIB

Ericsson is announcing that it has signed an agreement for credit facility with the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for USD 150 million, maturing in 2025. Of these new funds, 98 million will replace credit with NIB that was set to mature in 2021.

In addition to strengthening Ericsson’s balance sheet and financial flexibility, the loan has been granted for the purpose of financing Ericsson to support investments in research and development (R&D) in relation to the development of 5G technology during the years 2020-2022.

Key for success in the telecom industry is the delivery of future-proof, high-quality networks and solutions. To build on its technology leadership, Ericsson invested SEK 38 billion in R&D in 2018. This has enabled the company to be the leading contributor in the development of open telecom standards, with some 49,000 patents.

"Our increased investments to secure technology leadership in 5G, IoT and digital services have enabled us to reach nearly 80 commercial 5G agreements and contracts with unique operators, 24 of which are live networks - more than any other company,” said Erik Ekudden, Ericsson chief technology officer. “In the coming years, we will see 5G networks going live around the world, with major deployments from 2020 and we expect the global number of 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 billion in 2025. The technologies that we are investing in are fundamentally changing the way we innovate, collaborate, live and do business.”

BridgeClimb adopts RingCentral’s cloud communications and contact centre offerings to enable multichannel communications

BridgeClimb, the operator of Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge experience, adopted RingCentral Australia to enable multichannel communications and customer service. Looking to replace its legacy on-premise infrastructure, BridgeClimb has deployed RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Centre solutions across its entire staff. The implementation and cutover took place in October this year.

The RingCentral Office solution provides voice, video, online meetings and team messaging to support the communications needs for all BridgeClimb’s staff members. With this solution, BridgeClimb has replaced at least five different internal systems that they had been running previously to provide these various capabilities. 

RingCentral Contact Centre provides BridgeClimb’s customer service team multichannel capabilities with email, phone and chat in a universal queue. It is integrated with RingCentral Office and provides extensive performance reporting and analytics across the entire platform.

RingCentral Australia, provider of global enterprise cloud communications, collaboration, and contact centre solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of RingCentral Inc. The RingCentral platform empowers employees to work better together, from any location, on any device, and via any mode to serve customers, improving business efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

It also features unified voice, video meetings, team messaging, digital customer engagement, and integrated contact centre solutions for enterprises globally. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with business apps and enables customers to customise business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.

RingCentral’s Professional Services team completed the design, configuration and implementation of the unified communications and contact centre solutions. It took just seven weeks from the initial meeting between RingCentral and BridgeClimb to complete the cutover of the new solution.

BridgeClimb no longer has any single points of communications failure and no reliance on any physical infrastructure. RingCentral has a high availability, fully-redundant cloud and telecommunications infrastructure, end-to-end performance monitoring and SLAs, and real-time disaster recovery.

As a people-first organisation, the employee experience is critical for BridgeClimb. RingCentral’s user interface is very intuitive with similar functionality to the consumer communications apps that are already very familiar to most users. This made the transition to RingCentral a very smooth experience for BridgeClimb’s staff, and also ensures easy onboarding and training for new employees.

With RingCentral’s subscription model and no communications hardware requirements or user onboarding constraints, BridgeClimb can continue to grow its business without any technology limitations.

With BridgeClimb currently undergoing an extensive digital transformation, RingCentral’s ability to integrate ‘out of the box’ with many other systems and applications was another critical decision factor. RingCentral is already integrated with BridgeClimb’s Microsoft Office 365 environment, and the company will be looking to other integrations in the future, including a new CRM solution.

“We’re delighted to be associated with the iconic Sydney tourism experience BridgeClimb, and really looking forward to seeing how the BridgeClimb team leverages RingCentral’s open platform for further innovation and business transformation as they roll out new digital applications and services,” said Peter Hughes, regional sales vice president for Asia Pacific, RingCentral.

Broadcom debuts Automation.ai, its AI-driven platform that boosts digital business decision-making and execution

Broadcom has announced availability of Automation.ai, an AI-driven software intelligence platform purpose built to accelerate decision-making across multiple business and technology domains that support digital transformation initiatives. As enterprises increase digital investments, they must contend with increasing complexity and overwhelming volumes of data that slow even simple decision-making. 

Automation.ai correlates and analyzes this data and powers Digital BizOps from Broadcom, a new solution that uses these AI-driven insights to deliver intelligent recommendations—across business and development and operations to transform customer experience, increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiency and speed innovation.

“Digital transformation creates strain and pressure on businesses who need to move more quickly and confidently through the constant change rippling through their organizations,” said Ashok Reddy, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Software Division, Broadcom. “Silos of teams, tools and data impede decision-making. Automation.ai is central to Broadcom’s strategy to leverage AI and automation to create collective intelligence that speeds the informed decision-making critical to achieving digital business success.”

“At Sun Life, we put the client at the center of all we do,” said Barbara Mitchell, assistant vice president, IT Operations, Sun Life Financial, Inc. “As we continue on our digital transformation journey, we are always looking for new ways to harness the power of data. Our partnership with Broadcom will help us take that data and turn it into predictive insights to prevent outages that impact our client experience.”

Automation.ai harnesses the power of advanced machine learning (ML), intelligent automation and internet-scale open source frameworks to transform massive volumes of data from disparate toolsets, providing a unified approach to enterprise decision-making such as AI-driven to provide a predefined and out of box set of AI-driven analysis, correlation, recommendation and remediation services that are fully automated; open to ingest AIOps, DevOps, ValueOps, Automation COE domain data from a full-range of software, including Broadcom, third party and open source.

The offering is Always Learning so that users can continuously validates and improves decisions based on real-world outcomes; extensible so as to operate independently or within existing AI and machine learning ecosystems; and comes multi-cloud with fully containerized Kubernetes-based orchestration on public or private cloud.

AIOps from Broadcom leverages Automation.ai to correlate and analyze a broad range of IT monitoring data sources, and acts as a trusted proof point for the IT Operations analytics offered in Broadcom’s Digital BizOps solution. AIOps from Broadcom now includes new intelligent recommendations and auto-remediation capabilities that help IT teams predict and prevent problems before they impact user experience. 

Its capabilities include SRE DevOps dashboard that provides a new level of DevOps context to Site Reliability Engineers for historic and upcoming releases for production apps; ML-driven Recommendation Engine that provides prescriptions on how to resolve common problems, intelligent actions triggered by Automic Automation, and tribal knowledge recommendations based on customer data; new user journey analysis for flow and funnel visibility for faster triage of customer experience related issues; and enhanced Kubernetes monitoring and Prometheus integration, making it easier to monitor modern applications and infrastructures with smart instrumentation.

In related news, Broadcom recently completed the acquisition of privately-held Terma Software, whose solutions model workload dependencies, optimize workloads, enable intelligent SLAs and improve overall operational efficiency, in real-time. This acquisition will enrich the Automation.ai platform by providing new sources of workload intelligence and analytics to produce actionable insights from multiple vendors.

A10 Networks Orion 5G security lineup delivers business transformation for service providers

A10 Networks announced its Orion 5G Security Suite that enables mobile carriers and service providers to be ready for the business transformation 5G and NFV brings. The suite allows customers to meet the requirements needed today and helps them future proof their networks for tomorrow by delivering security, scalability, agility and analytics, while integrating with a partner ecosystem. A10 brings unique expertise from working with many of the production 5G networks that are now operational around the world.

A10 Networks has been at the forefront of initial 5G rollouts with tier-one carriers worldwide and is working with many others to plan for their future 5G initiatives. 

With the announcement of the 5G Orion Security Suite, service providers have a proven comprehensive suite of secure applications services that have been engineered for cloud-native architecture to aid in making their 5G and NFV strategies successful. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite enables advanced security and reliability functions as individual services by modularizing and offering them as a service layer with a set of connected technologies that employ automated intelligence, machine learning and centralized visibility and control.

Partnering with tier-one operators, A10 has honed its solutions to meet the critical 5G requirements for improved security, reliability and performance learned from 5G network rollouts over the last year. A10 provides an interconnected suite – virtual or physical – resulting in lower latency, larger scale, higher reliability and lower TCO—all of which have been required for the emerging 5G use cases customers are enabling.

In the last year to 18 months, first movers have deployed the first wave of 5G networks and demonstrated improved customer satisfaction and increased average revenue per user (ARPU), despite an increase in network demands, including higher data usage and download rates.

The Orion 5G Security Suite addresses existing and emerging mobile network architecture requirements for agility, consolidated services, greater scale, and lower latency communications across the Gi-LAN, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite’s disaggregated, cloud-native security services provide agility while maintaining scale and performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. It also goes beyond just protecting the data plane through a GiFW by adding protection for the control plane and signaling plane with full visibility.

The Orion 5G Security Suite represents a major evolution of the company’s 5G strategy outlined in late 2018 by providing a comprehensive solution for mobile operators and other service providers to successfully deploy 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) solutions at hyperscale for 5G devices and new NFVi requirements.

A10 supports existing 4G and 3G network architectures and use cases for the Gi-LAN and EPC, while catering to demanding requirements for 5G architectures, including the cloud-native agility needed for MEC. These solutions can be deployed in infrastructure but are future proofed for 5G deployments. This includes functional consolidation for application visibility and control, subscriber-aware intelligent traffic steering, Gi/SGi firewall with carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), GTP/SCTP firewall, integrated DDoS for frequently attacked services, intelligent traffic steering and more.

5G demands are inherently different than 4G, with smaller packet sizes, more throughput, and higher concurrent session counts. A10 solutions can scale concurrent sessions to multi-billion levels and throughput to multi-terabit levels in a scale-out cluster. 5G deployments can benefit from compact and efficient options, for example, 385 Gbps in compact physical network functions (PNFs), or high-performance 180 Gbps virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). 

Support for Kubernetes and Docker containers are available now. The compact PNF form factors and very high-performance software offerings (including containerized) are especially beneficial in emerging MEC use cases where space and power are at a premium.

With new user-plane and control-plane security requirements coupled with the increased attack surface and scale brought by 5G and IoT device proliferation, more advanced, scalable and automated approaches are needed. To guarantee uptime and ensure control- and user-plane security, components include edge firewall, GTP firewall, Gi/SGi firewall, control- and user-plane policy enforcement, DNS protection, RAN security gateways (SeGW), and more. 

Additionally, A10’s advanced DDoS protection solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with its Zero-day Attack Protection (ZAP), continuous base lining, and One-DDoS for distributed intelligence. This provides full visibility into all packets versus traditional sample-based-only solutions. Network-wide ML-powered DDoS detection and mitigation for in-house protection can also be offered as a customer scrubbing service.

A10’s solutions can be delivered in a variety of form factors to meet the demands of the emerging NFVi architecture including, VNFs, CNFs, bare metal and PNFs. These solutions are integrated with leading NFVi architectures and interoperate with multiple MANO environments for faster network roll-out and optimized performance and agility. A10 also provides flexible software licensing and consumption with FlexPool subscription-based capacity pooling licensing.

A10 Harmony Controller provides actionable intelligence to manage subscriber services, meet law enforcement agency mandates and compliance, and deliver per-subscriber analytics. Harmony Controller provides visibility, management, orchestration and automation. Coordination of distributed One-DDoS data from all the Orion 5G Security Suite solutions is seamlessly orchestrated from the integrated aGalaxy TPS system.

A10’s products integrate with multiple third-party solutions and vendors, ranging from DevOps tools, such as Ansible, to providers of 5G solutions such as Ericsson, Red Hat, NEC, Tech Mahindra and Lenovo.

Gartner highlights top 10 trends impacting infrastructure and operations for 2020

Research firm Gartner highlighted on Tuesday trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for to support digital infrastructure in 2020. Analysts presented the findings during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, which is taking place here through Thursday.

“This past year, infrastructure trends focused on how technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) or edge computing might support rapidly growing infrastructure and support business needs at the same time,” said Ross Winser, senior research director at Gartner. “While those demands are still present, our 2020 list of trends reflect their ‘cascade effects,’ many of which are not immediately visible today.”

During his presentation, Winser encouraged I&O leaders to take a step back from “the pressure of keeping the lights on” and prepare for 10 key technologies and trends likely to significantly impact their support of digital infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.

In recent years, Gartner has detected a significant range of automation maturity across clients: Most organizations are automating to some level, in many cases attempting to refocus staff on higher-value tasks. However, automation investments are often made without an overall automation strategy in mind.

“As vendors continue to pop up and offer new automation options, enterprises risk ending up with a duplication of tools, processes and hidden costs that culminate to form a situation where they simply cannot scale infrastructure in the way the business expects,” said Winser. “We think that by 2025, top performing leaders will have employed a dedicated role to steward automation forward and invest to build a proper automation strategy to get away from these ad hoc automation issues.”

“Today’s infrastructure is in many places — colocation, on-premises data centers, edge locations, and in cloud services. The reality of this situation is that hybrid IT will seriously disrupt your incumbent disaster recover (DR) planning if it hasn’t already,” said Winser.

Often, organizations heavily rely on “as a service (aaS)” offerings, where it is easy to overlook the optional features necessary to establish the correct levels of resilience. For instance, by 2021, the root cause of 90 percent of cloud-based availability issues will be the failure to fully use cloud service provider native redundancy capabilities.

“Organizations are left potentially exposed when their heritage DR plans designed for traditional systems have not been reviewed with new hybrid infrastructures in mind. Resilience requirements must be evaluated at design stages rather than treated as an afterthought two years after deployment,” said Winser.

For enterprises trying to scale DevOps, action is needed in 2020 to find an efficient approach for success. Although individual product teams typically master DevOps practices, constraints begin to emerge as organizations attempt to scale the number of DevOps teams.

“We believe that the vast majority of organizations that do not adopt a shared self-service platform approach will find that their DevOps initiatives simply do not scale,” said Winser. “Adopting a shared platform approach enables product teams to draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities, all the while benefiting from high standards of governance and efficiency needed for scale.”

“Last year, we introduced the theme of ’infrastructure is everywhere’ that the business needs it. As technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) are harnessed as competitive differentiators, planning for how explosive data growth will be managed is vital,” said Winser. In fact, by 2022, 60 percent of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers, according to Gartner.

“The attraction of moving selected workloads closer to users for performance and compliance reasons is understandable. Yet we are rapidly heading toward scenarios where these same workloads run across many locations and cause data to be harder to protect. Cascade effects of data movement combined with data growth will hit I&O folks hard if they are not preparing now.”

Successful IoT projects have many considerations, and no single vendor is likely to provide a complete end-to-end solution. 

“I&O must get involved in the early planning discussions of the IoT puzzle to understand the proposed service and support model at scale. This will avoid the cascade effect of unforeseen service gaps, which could cause serious headaches in future,” said Winser.

Distributed cloud is defined as the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while operation, governance, updates and the evolution of those services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.

“Emerging options for distributed cloud will enable I&O teams to put public cloud services in the location of their choosing, which could be really attractive for leaders looking to modernize using public cloud,” said Winser.

However, Winser points out that the nascent nature of many of these solutions means a wide range of considerations must not be overlooked. “Enthusiasm for new services like AWS Outposts, Microsoft Azure Stack or Google Anthos must be matched early on with diligence in ensuring the delivery model for these solutions is fully understood by I&O teams who will be involved in supporting them.”

“Customer standards for the experience delivered by I&O capabilities are higher than ever,” said Winser. “Previous ‘value adds’ like seamless integration, rapid responses and zero downtime are now simply baseline customer expectations.”

Winser warned leaders that as digital business systems reach deeper into I&O infrastructures, the potential impact of even the smallest of I&O issues expands. “If the customer experience is good, you might grow in mind and market share over time; but if the experience is bad, the impacts are immediate and could potentially impact corporate reputation rather than just customer satisfaction.”

Low-code is a visual development approach to application development that is becoming increasingly appealing to business units. It enables developers of varied experience levels to create applications for web and mobile with little or no coding experience, largely driving a “self-service” model for business units instead of turning to central IT for a formal project plan.

In many cases, network teams have excelled in delivering highly available networks, which is often achieved through cautious change management. At the same time, the pace of change is tough for I&O to keep up with, and there are no signs of things slowing down.

Winser said that the continued pressure to keep the lights shining brightly has created unexpected issues for the network. “Cultural challenges of risk avoidance, technical debt and vendor lock-in all mean that some network teams face a tough road ahead. 2020 needs to be the time for cultural shifts, as investment in new network technologies is only part of the answer.”

As the realities of hybrid digital infrastructures kick in, the scale and complexity of managing them is becoming a more pressing issue for IT leaders.

Organizations should investigate the concept of HDIM, which looks to address the primary management issues of a hybrid infrastructure. 

“This is an emerging area, so organizations should be wary of vendors who say they have tools that offer a single solution to all their hybrid management issues today. Over the next few years, though, we expect vendors focused on HDIM to deliver improvements that enable IT leaders to get the answers they need far faster than they can today.”