Hans Vestberg, President and CEO of Ericsson, said in his address to journalists on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that “only our imaginations can stop us” in realizing a networked society, where everything that can benefit from a connection will have one.
Vestberg says three forces are coming together as the foundation for the networked society: mobility, broadband, and the cloud. To support all three forces, he listed, of course, new products and concepts launched by Ericsson at Mobile World Congress. Those include: the Ericsson Device Connection Platform, which helps operators quickly and easily launch machine-to-machine solutions, Antenna integrated radio – the first stepping stone towards a heterogeneous network, IP networking portfolio, and a PC as a Service solution, which allows operators to bundle software in the cloud on top of mobile broadband subscriptions for consumers.
The President and CEO highlighted that Ericsson has launched 16 LTE networks in 11 countries on three continents. “We will not compromise on technology leadership,” Vestberg said. He also emphasized that the growing services business is a unique competitive advantage for Ericsson, the only vendor to have won a managed services deal for LTE. “Our customers trust us to help them build, manage and run the world’s best networks and we can draw from that for future LTE products, solutions and deployments. We put our customers first,” he said.
Vestberg stressed the importance of quality assurance in the network, especially as cloud services become a place for new business innovation and services. “The network is the make-or-break part of the equation,” he said, and announced a strategic alliance with Akamai to ensure quality of service through to mobile devices.
Akamai President David Kenny joined Vestberg onstage to introduce the partnership, which begins with a joint setup of an optimized content delivery network on a global basis.
Additionally, Ericsson launched a range of different caching solutions in the Smart Services Router and Radio Network Controller to help operators improve the end-user experience and to optimize capacity use in IP and radio networks, respectively.
Vestberg spoke of combining IT and telecom into a new ICT industry where possibilities were heightened for innovation and collaboration, and ideas are exchanged online without limits on time or geography, and new business models are being tested continually. “Only our imaginations can limit us when thinking about the potential of the ICT industry in the networked society,” he said. Several recent services-wins in ICT, both in Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific are paving the way for even more business in this domain, it says.