VMware Unveils 5G and Edge Advancements

Strengthened 5G Telco Cloud Portfolio with Cloud Native Support enables businesses to better harness emerging technologies in region’s cloud and mobile first economy

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VMware, Inc. today announced its 5G Telco Cloud Platform, empowering Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to better meet the growing demands for 5G-powered innovations in Southeast Asia. The VMware 5G Telco Cloud Platform is a consistent cloud-first solution, powered by carrier-grade and high-performance cloud native infrastructure that enables CSPs to support future-forward technology applications across the region. 

With Southeast Asia’s digital economy expected to hit US$300 billion by 2025^[1], organizations in the region are stepping up on their digital transformation efforts to accelerate the pace of business innovation as they adapt to dynamic customer demands, amidst an increasingly cloud and mobile-first economy. With businesses looking to 5G to supercharge their growth, CSPs in the region require a field proven network powered by a modernized cloud that delivers web-scale speed and agility while maintaining carrier-grade performance, resiliency, and quality. VMware’s innovative multi-cloud platform simplifies and accelerates the rollout of 5G networks, while enabling CSPs to embrace cloud native principles, enabling them to deploy innovative applications and services to market faster to better meet the growing demands from businesses in the region. 

“VMware continues to accelerate the delivery of a comprehensive telco and edge cloud portfolio that addresses our customers’ challenges of today and enables them to harness the opportunities of tomorrow,” said Sanjay K. Deshmukh, vice president and managing director, Southeast Asia and Korea, VMware. “With support for cloud native technologies in the Telco Cloud Platform, CSPs can now boost their innovation speed to deliver new applications and services, reduce operational complexities, and realize substantial total cost of ownership savings, further accelerating the rollout of their 5G networks to support the growth of Southeast Asia’s digital economy.”

The VMware Telco Cloud Platform combines VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure – an evolution of the vCloud NFV solution – and VMware Telco Cloud Automation – the recently launched multi-domain orchestration and automation capability. The 5G ready Telco Cloud Platform is tailored for CSPs to easily embrace cloud native technology and deliver applications and services across multi-cloud infrastructure. As CSPs evolve from NFV networks to cloud native and containerized networks, VMware is evolving its VMware vCloud NFV solution to Telco Cloud Infrastructure, providing CSPs a consistent and unified platform delivering consistent operations for both Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) across telco networks. Telco Cloud Infrastructure is designed to optimize the delivery of network services with telco centric enhancements, supporting distributed cloud deployments, and providing scalability and performance for millions of consumer and enterprise users. These telco centric enhancements enable CSPs to gain web-scale speed and agility while maintaining carrier-grade performance, resiliency, and quality.

Tightly integrated with Telco Cloud Infrastructure, VMware’s Telco Cloud Automation intelligently automates the end-to-end lifecycle management of network functions and services to simplify operations and accelerate service delivery while optimizing resource utilization. Telco Cloud Automation also now supports infrastructure and Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) management automation to streamline workload placement and deliver optimal infrastructure resource allocation. It also significantly simplifies the 5G and telco edge network expansions through zero-touch-provisioning (ZTP) whenever capacity is required.

To speed up the deployment of network functions and services by CSPs, VMware recently expanded the Ready for Telco Cloud program to add support for VMware Telco Cloud Automation. With the release of VMware Telco Cloud Platform, VMware is further expanding the program to accelerate network functions readiness for deployment. The program scope extends to container-based network functions and these workloads conformance with VMware’s Cloud Native stack as well as the automation offered by the stack. CSPs can expect that Network Functions which passed certification will be quicker to onboard and deploy on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform while accelerating CSPs time to revenue. To date, more than 35 partners have received more than 180 certifications as part of the program.

VMware is also announcing Telco Cloud Operations, a real-time automated assurance solution designed to bridge the gap between virtual and physical networks. The solution provides holistic monitoring and performance management across multiple layers of the network, including SD-WAN, for rapid insights, lower costs and improved customer experience. It integrates machine-learning based performance analytics and vivid reporting dashboards for proactive assurance.  Complemented by the Uhana solution from VMware that provides intelligent automation for Radio Access Networks (RANs), CSPs can have comprehensive operations visibility across their entire network.

^[1] e-Conomy SEA 2019 report, Google, Temasek and Bain, Oct 2019