The companies have signed an agreement to expand collaboration within the strategic partnership they forged in early 2018.
Telenor Group’s CEO, Sigve Brekke, and Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins signed a Joint Purpose Agreement 2.0 to expand their innovation partnership to include cybersecurity, cloud and the digital workplace. They will also explore Open Virtualised RAN (vRAN) solutions for 5G.
The collaboration will be governed by a committee chaired by Ruza Sabanovic (read her recent interview with Mobile Europe here), CTO at Telenor Group, and Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM, Service Provider Business, Cisco, with the aim of ensuring structured deliveries for shared goals.
In early 2018, Cisco and Telenor Group initiated their strategic partnership and have since collaborated on data analysis, IoT, Smart City, and security solutions.
Modernising Telenor
Sigve Brekke, President & CEO of Telenor Group, said, “We’re in the midst of modernising Telenor, preparing both ourselves and our customers for continued digitalisation. Doing so, we’re happy to enhance our collaboration with a key technology partner such as Cisco for solutions within cybersecurity, cloud and Open vRAN for 5G.
“We’re already working closely together on a number of innovative projects and are looking forward to a deeper engagement on some of the areas that matter most to our customers: fast, reliable, efficient and secure connectivity.”
Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco, added, “Cisco is focused on innovating to help our customers evolve their networks to be more flexible and programmable as we look to 5G, and the billions of connections this new era will make possible.
“Telenor Group shares our vision for the digital future, and we look forward to continuing to deliver on our mutual commitments to benefit both of our customers.”
• Telenor-backed Working Group Two (WG2) has announced a cloud-managed mobile network with Cisco Ultra Packet Core on Amazon Web Services (AWS), running both control and user plane. The WG2 platform is designed to help mobile operators and enterprises to create and monetise services that control the network through a cloud-based API.
Sabanovic said Telenor is proud to have incubated WG2 in the early phases and that as its first customer, Telenor can see how small and agile teams can achieve impressive output when using cloud infrastructure.
WG2 is also supported by Digital Alpha, a financial fund backed by Cisco.