Ericsson taps into AI in a bid to boost services offering

Networking vendor Ericsson is banking on an injection of artificial intelligence special sauce to augment its support services portfolio.

Essentially this is all about using things like predictive analytics and machine learning to automate the network management process and speed up things like fault isolation and recovery. Ericsson is positioning this as a pillar in the move to virtualization, 5G, IoT and all manner of other telecoms goodness.

“As operators face increasing network complexity with the introduction of new use cases, they must become more proactive,” said Fredrik Jejdling, head of Business Area Networks at Ericsson. “Through close collaboration between our support engineers and our customers’ operations – and by making use of automation, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence techniques – we’re putting the zero-defect network vision within our customers’ reach.”

Ericsson is desperate to improve its software and services credentials, and thus reduce its reliance on a terminally declining networking hardware market. The vendor has apparently been trialling this tech with some of its existing operator customers and will hope it not only keeps them spending but attracts some new ones too.

“We are working with Ericsson to explore the power of data analytics to enhance network operations,” said Rodrigo Orozco, Head of Network Operations at Entel Chile. “Together, we were able to prevent approximately 85 percent of critical incidents in the network. This proactive approach significantly reduced the impact of any network issues on our end users.”

Support Services with added AI is rolling out in three phases: ‘analyse and change’ is available now, ‘isolate and recover’ will be available in a month and ‘predict and prevent comes out at the end of July. It all falls under a new Ericsson brand called Engineered Intelligence.