Industry momentum grows for network orchestration and automation

In Q3, 2020, Ericsson surpassed the 100-customer milestone for its Ericsson Orchestrator solution, underlining the current industry momentum in the areas of network virtualization, automation and orchestration.

Jan Karlsson, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Area Digital Services, Ericsson, says: “With 105 orchestration customers and 139 commercial contracts, we have solidified that Ericsson’s orchestration solution provides the capabilities service providers need to efficiently operate their networks, increase agility, and build new services quickly for their whole customer base. Thanks to our leadership in this area, we will continue to help our customers future-proof their networks and stay ahead in the race to obtain 5G market share.”

Analysis of Ericsson’s orchestration customers indicates that 60 percent have selected Ericsson Orchestrator for management and orchestration of NFVi (NFV infrastructure and virtual network functions), but that the number of service providers orchestrating advanced enterprise services is increasing.

The top three enterprise services today are:

• SD-WAN orchestration
• WAN optimization (often in conjunction with SD-WAN)
• Enterprise security services

Many enterprise services are multi-vendor, and service providers expect to be able to orchestrate multi-cloud services in the future.

Peo Lehto, Head of Ericsson Solution Area OSS, Ericsson, says: “Our smart orchestration solutions transform our customers’ operations to cut time to market, automate order fulfilment and improve operations. This is made possible with efficient lifecycle management and closed-loop assurance built with AI and machine learning.” 

Ericsson’s orchestration solution enables automation of hybrid infrastructure including PNFs and VNFs in a multi-vendor environment. It supports resource orchestration, VNF life cycle management and end-to-end service orchestration for both telecom and enterprise environments. With this solution, Ericsson’s customers can expect to reduce time-to-market (TTM) for new service development by up to 70 percent, reduce operational costs by up to 30 percent, and enable new enterprise service revenues.

Orchestration is also a vital component for 5G network slices, which are predicted to be a key revenue enabler in the 5G for enterprise arena. Ericsson’s orchestration solution is already supporting cloud native functions and orchestrating services across domains, all the way from the edge to private and public cloud.

Ericsson currently has 105 orchestration customers, 139 commercial contracts and 61 live deployments. Publicly announced orchestration contracts include deals with TIM, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica and Swisscom.