The Swedish vendor says it has secured 139 commercial orchestration deals with over 100 global communications service providers.
In Q3, 2020, Ericsson surpassed the 100-customer milestone for its Ericsson Orchestrator solution, underlining industry momentum in the areas of network virtualisation, automation and orchestration.
Analysis of Ericsson’s orchestration customers indicates that 60% selected Ericsson Orchestrator for management and orchestration of NFV infrastructure (NFVi) and virtual network functions (VNFs), but overall, the number of network operators that are orchestrating enterprise services is increasing.
According to Ericsson, the top three enterprise services are:
1. SD-WAN orchestration
2. WAN optimisation (often in conjunction with SD-WAN)
3. Enterprise security services.
The company noted that many enterprise services are multi-vendor, and service providers expect to be able to orchestrate multi-cloud services in the future.
Lifecycle management et al
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 physical network functions (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 the solution, Ericsson claims customers can expect to reduce time-to-market for new service development by up to 70%, reduce operational costs by up to 30%, and enable new enterprise service revenues.
Edge to cloud
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, from the edge to private and public cloud.
Ericsson has 105 orchestration customers, 139 commercial contracts and 61 live deployments.