MWC19: Where Telecommunications and Cloud Meet

As a cloud solution architect, my passion is learning the details about how cloud computing uniquely supports specific business cases. This curiosity is what drove my excitement when Ericsson invited me to work with them during Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. As the largest mobile event in the world, MWC Barcelona brings together the latest innovations and leading-edge technology from more than 2,400 leading companies. With its highly-rated conference program and assemblage of telecommunications visionaries, it seemed like the perfect venue for getting details about how the cloud is driving changes across the mobile and wireless landscape.

Cloud computing and digital transformation have rapidly redefined telecommunications. From a service provider point of view, this redefinition requires entirely new skills including:

• The ideation of new customer services and revenue streams;
• The operational flexibility to create, develop, test, deploy and manage these new services; and
• Automated and continuous service improvement across much more comprehensive service portfolios.

Telecom service providers also need to efficiently manage the multitude of network types, service types, system stacks and infrastructure layers which can cause untenable complexity for many operators. Complexity is also the root cause of an inability to maintain profit margins or deliver customer desired service performance for new services (i.e., 5G and IoT). To be competitive, network operators experiencing this situation need to “digitally transform†operations through deployment of network virtualization capabilities and software-defined networking.

As the market leader, Ericsson is delivering a powerful, cloud computing-based solution to address all of these requirements today. They actually call it their “5G Platform.â€