Ericsson backs Google to give it an edge in the cloud market

Swedish kit vendor Ericsson and US internet giant Google have decided to help each other out when it comes to flogging mobile edge stuff.

There’s a bit of a land grab going on when it comes to the edge, with every week seemingly revealing some new pact between a telecoms player and a public cloud giant. Market leader AWS recently unveiled its latest conquest in the form of Vodafone, so its competitors were under pressure to respond in kind.

Google Cloud’s partnership with Ericsson is a general edge collaboration with telcos especially in mind. The have apparently already achieved ‘functional onboarding’ (which sounds like corporate-speak for integration) of Ericsson 5G on Anthos, so that’s something. They’re also piloting enterprise applications at the edge on a live network with TIM.

“Combined with edge cloud capabilities, 5G has the potential to accelerate the digital transformation of virtually any sector of industry or society,” said Niklas Heuveldop, Head of Ericsson North America. “We are excited about our partnership with Google Cloud as we engage with our customers to leverage our combined capabilities to solve real-world business challenges for the benefit of consumers, enterprises and society at large.”

“Organizations have a tremendous opportunity to digitally transform their businesses with 5G and cloud capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning at the edge,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “We are proud to partner with Ericsson to help build a foundation for communications service providers and enterprises alike to take advantage of cloud technology and cloud-native services, from telecom network core to the edge and enterprise premises.”

We must surely be approaching a time when every conceivable partnership between a public cloud giant and an operator or kit vendor has been made. Then what happens if, for example, Vodafone wants Ericsson’s help at the edge? Do AWS and Google Cloud collaborate or will they just have a great big fight, with the winner getting the spoils? It should be fun finding out.