VMware has made a number of announcements at Mobile World Congress that extend its work as an agent for enabling change amongst Telcos.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, told press that there will be two types of projects pushing forward 5G, saying; “We’ll have two types, those built on NFV and those that won’t work.” The CEO’s confidence in his statement made it clear that VMware considers itself to already be in a good position.
To further cement its position in the market, VMware has announced the release of VMware vCloud NFV 2.0. This release is said to be designed to help global communications service providers to modernise and transform their network architectures.
The company said that with this product CSPs will be able to: “Deliver new and differentiated services on an agile, open and secure software-defined architecture…as they evolve their networks to support 5G and the Internet of Things.”
The ETSI-compliant, integrated, modular and multi-tenancy NFV platform focuses on areas such as service automation, secure multi-tenancy, operations management and carrier-grade availability.
On the security front, VMware says that the newest release will help CSPs to get full visibility of all components within a deployed service across overlay, underlay, virtual and physical environments through vRealise Network Insight.
The vCloud NFV platform provides continuous, near real-time data on the health, performance, capacity of network resources, while Open APIs will provide northbound integration with service assurance solutions.
Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware, said: “In today’s highly competitive environment, CSPs must deliver innovative services faster, with the best end-to-end customer experience and at the lowest cost. Current network architectures, including some virtualized deployments, remain rigid and expensive to build and manage.”
The virtualisation company is also extending its footprint in the IoT with a formal collaboration with HARMAN, a company that provides technologies for automotive, consumer and enterprise markets.
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The purpose of the partnership is to help accelerate the adoption of the IoT for enterprises through convergance of IT and operational technologies.
A part of the deal, Harman’s over-the-air services will be integrated into VMware’s IoT solution.
Sanjay Dhawan, president, HARMAN Connected Services, said: “HARMAN and VMware’s complementary IoT offering will change the landscape for non-traditional technology companies, providing them with new growth opportunities that will set them apart from their competitors.”
The final announcement is that CSPs are now able to offer VMware AirWatch as a managed service through the VMware vCloud Air Netwrk Managed Services Provider offering.
VMware is calling this an “industry first turnkey solutions for CSPs to offer EMM managed services without investing in their own application infrastructure or simply hosting a given customers’ EMM licenses in their data centre.”
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Basically this means that enterprises won’t have to focus as many resources on IT tasks as the managed service should help to alleviate some of the cost and time burdens associated with deploying and managing their own services.
