Ericsson CTO says mobile industry need to invest more in cloud

In order to stay ahead of the curve and enjoy new revenue streams from cloud services the mobile industry will need to invest substantially more than it does today, according to Ericsson’s chief technology officer Ulf Ewaldsson.

Ewaldsson shared his thoughts on the intersect between cloud, mobile and broadband with a group of cloud gurus and tech specialists at the Structure: Europe conference in London Wednesday afternoon.

“The carriers are undergoing very big changes at the moment. Everyone is aware that we’re going away from voice-centric tarrifing and voice centric proposals, and we can see that this means a very big change in networks,” Ewaldsson said, “a very IP-centric network,” adding that opening up these networks to the kind of innovation happening in the cloud space will ensure the mobile industry isn’t left behind.

He said he believes most of the innovation will take place in the over-the-top (OTT) space, but to really add value networks will need to differentiate, and even consider deep integration like opening up their own APIs to control the voice engine.

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Ewaldsson said that network operators need to embrace cloud and software defined networking if they want to remain flexible enough to play in the cloud space. “The only reason why the innovation power that’s going on in the cloud will not be unleashed or not happen is if the networks are not good enough,” Ewaldsson said. Working with a lot of these technologies, “we have innovated a lot of things that we want to do, and then we see they cannot be realised because the networks are not good enough,” he added.

Ericsson is a backer of software defined networking and is investing heavily in bringing SDN in conjunction with other cloud-centric networking technologies into the datacentres of operators. The company recently invested in three new ICT datacentres in Sweden and Canada that will investigate the coming together of cloud and core network technologies.