Showing posts with label mobile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mobile. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Citrix and HPE Team to Make Sense of the Core-Cloud-Edge Architecture

Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are aligned to bring new capabilities to the coalescing architectures around data center core, hybrid cloud, and edge computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile appDownload the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories.

Gardner
One of the key elements of digital transformation is aligning the core, cloud, and edge using new architectures and efficiencies. New levels of simplicity are needed to satisfy the requirements of both the end user and IT operators.

The next BriefingsDirect IT solutions ecosystem profile interview examines how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are specifically aligned to help bring such digital transformation benefits to market.

To learn more about the venerable and always-innovative Citrix-HPE partnership, we are now joined by executives from these two key enterprise IT players. Please join me in welcoming Jim Luna, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Citrix. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Luna: Thanks, good to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Jeff Carlat, Senior Director of Global Alliances at HPE. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Carlat: Good to see you again, Dana.

Gardner: Jim, what trends are driving the need for innovation around mobile workspaces?

Luna
Luna: As customers embark through digital transformation they still need to access their apps, data, and desktops from anywhere. With the advent of 5G wireless, and new network connectivity, we need to allow customers to be able to get their data and apps from any device as well. So we see a transformation in the marketplace.

Carlat: We are also looking at a new workforce coming in, the millennials, and they realize the traditional way of going to your job is totally being changed. To be able to be at work anytime, anyplace, anywhere -- and removing the barriers of where work is – that is driving us to co-innovate. We are delivering solutions that allow the freedom to be more efficient anywhere.

Gardner: There’s a chicken-and-egg relationship. On one hand, the core, cloud, and edge can work in tandem to allow for safe, secure, and compliant data and applications sharing activities. And that encourages people to change their work behaviors, to become more productive. It’s hard to decide, which is leading which?

Work anywhere, anytime on any device 

Luna: Traditionally, people had a desktop with applications, and they wanted that particular image replicated throughout their environment. But with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that are web-delivered, they now need more of a management workspace, if you will, that allows them to work with any type of application -- whether it’s being delivered locally, on-premises, or through a cloud-based SaaS application. Delivering a unified workspace anywhere becomes critical for them.

Carlat: We also have requirements around security -- increasing the security of data and personal files. This forces us to work together, to take that workspace but not have it sitting in a vulnerable laptop left in a Starbucks. Instead that desktop sits back in the comfort and safety of a locked-up data center.

Luna: People want a simple experience. They don’t want a complicated experience as they access their apps and data. So, simplicity becomes key. User experience (UX) becomes key. And choice becomes key as well.
Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance
Carlat: On expectations of simplicity and UX, if I find it hard to log-in to SharePoint I may just give up and say, “Well, I’m not going to be using those services.” It’s so easy to just move to the next item on your list.

Like I said, with millennials, that’s the expectation. It’s a mandatory requirement. If we can’t deliver that ease of experience to them, others will.

Gardner: User expectations are higher. They want flexibility. They want to be more productive anywhere. We know the technologies are available to accomplish this.

What’s holding back organizations from executing? How are Citrix and HPE together forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts to help businesses execute on this vision?

Collaborate to simplify 

Luna: Traditionally it’s been the complexity of the deployment of the architecture -- both on the hardware side, as well as on the software side. The things that we are doing together are simplifying that process from a deployment perspective, from a manageability perspective, from a support perspective, as well as the other features of experience, security, and choice.

We are working to simplify the experience -- not just in terms of managing and deploying, but also to make sure that that end-user experience is simplified as well.

Gardner: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been around for some time, but earlier there were issues around network capacity, and certain media formats lagged. These performance issues have been largely put to rest. How does that factor into accelerating mobile workspaces adoption?

Carlat
Carlat: In the 22 years of my IT experience at Compaq and HPE, I’ve seen the processor compute power increase significantly. The network, storage, and other inhibitors, from a technology standpoint, are pretty much gone now.

It moves the problem away from the infrastructure to the complexity issue. How do you unleash that potential in a manner that is easy to consume. That’s the next level.

Luna: One of the other things our partnership allows is more choice. With HPE infrastructure, we have a variety of different choices available to customers, according to their unique requirements. There is now choice in terms of the architecture that better suits their deployment requirements.

Gardner: We’ve heard about hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) helping people on deployments. We’ve heard about appliance models. Are these part of that new choice?

Carlat: Yes, that’s why we have come together. We are delivering workspace appliances with Citrix on top of our HPE SimpliVity HCI portfolio.

Not only is a customer going to capture the benefits of everything that’s gone into our SimpliVity HCI platform, but we marry it with the world that Citrix provides for VDI, virtual applications, and mobile desktops.

Luna: On one hand, we’re making it easier for established customers to manage their Citrix environments through a simplified management plane with Citrix Cloud Services. But by having the security of that data sitting locally on a SimpliVity appliance -- that’s really good for customers in terms of data governance, data control, and data security.

But there are other architectures for other segments, like in the financial services industry, where we have trader workstations that provide multi-monitor support and high graphics capabilities. So, choice is key.
By having the security of the data sitting locally on an HPE SimpliVity appliance -- that's good for customers in terms of governance, data control, and data security.

Carlat: Yes, as these traders are executing trades, any latency is going to eliminate your technology from being used. So there are very, very strict in requirements around latency or performance, as well as security. There are also benefits on total cost, space, and being able to deliver a very rich media environment. Sometimes it’s upward of six monitors, they have to be patched into this, too.

Through the capabilities we have coming together – of bridging our leading infrastructure with the Citrix portfolio -- it makes a magical combination that can be easily deployed, and it just works.

Gardner: As I mentioned, we want to provide more simplicity for IT operators. One of the things that Citrix has been working out for years is intelligent network capabilities. How Citrix is addressing simplicity around these requirements?

Cloud-control solutions

Luna: Citrix is moving to a cloud service model where these technologies are available through a cloud-control plane, whether that’s VDI, or gateway-as-a-service, or a load-balancer-as-a-service. All of those things can be provisioned from a central plane, on-premises or on a customer’s device. And those are solutions we can deliver whether it is on a standard HPE ProLiant DL380 server, or whether it’s SimpliVity HCI, or whether that’s on HPE Moonshot or a Synergy composable infrastructure environment. Those architectures simply can be delivered and managed through a cloud service onto HPE infrastructures.

Gardner: We’ve also been hearing about complexity of hybrid IT models. Not only we are asking folks to implement things like VDI in workspaces, but now they have to make choices about private, public cloud, or some combination.

How does the Citrix and HPE alliance help manage the gap between public and private cloud?
Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance
Carlat: We are aligned, HPE and Citrix, in our view of how IT and consumers are going to bridge and use public cloud resources. We believe there is a right mix, a hybrid approach, where you are going to have both on-premises and the cloud.

At HPE we have several tools to help the brokering of applications between on-premises to off-premises. And we provide that flexibility and choice in an agnostic manner.

Luna: We’ve recognized that the world is a hybrid cloud world. The public cloud has a lot more complexity due to the number and choice of public cloud providers. So we are not only driving hybrid cloud solutions -- we also have value-added services such as HPE Pointnext that allows customers to incrementally define their architecture, better deploy that architecture, and better manage those services to allow for a better customer experience overall.

Gardner: We are also thinking nowadays about the edge for many kinds of devices, such as sensors on a factory floor. Is this an area where the alliance between Citrix and HPE can be brought to bear? How does the Internet of things (IoT) relate to what you do?

Explosion at the edge 

Carlat: We see exploding growth at the edge. And we define the edge as anything not in the data center. Increasingly more-and-more of the analytics and the insights will be derived at the edge. We are already doing a lot with Citrix.

A major financial institution with hundreds of thousands of clients is using the edge and our HPE and Citrix technologies together. This market is only going to grow -- and the requirements increase from scalability to usability.

The edge can also be grimy; it can be a very difficult physical environment. We take all of that into account across the whole solution stack to ensure that we are providing the expected experience.

Luna: Performance is key. As we look at the core to edge, we have a distributed model that allows for data to stay as close as possible to that end-customer -- and therefore provide the best performance and experience. And the best analytics.

We must consider, can we grab the data necessary that’s being accessed at that particular endpoint and transmit that data back? Can we provide telemetry to the customer for managing that environment and making that environment even better for the customer?

In our case, the Citrix Analytics Service is part of our offering. To pull that data and serve that up to the customer in a manner that they are able to manage in that environment is a plus.

Analytics offer insight

Gardner: Analytics certainly becomes an important requirement. We have analytics at the edge; we have analytics in the cloud. We are not just talking about delivering apps; we are talking about first managing data -- and then taking that data and making it actionable. How does the data and the data analysis factor into what you are doing?

Carlat: Increasingly we see the shift to a consumption-based delivery of IT.  Our HPE GreenLake services provide capabilities for customers to not be mired in maintaining and monitoring all the infrastructure -- but actually just consume it on an as-needed basis. So that’s a one-key element.

Luna: Citrix is coming out with a Citrix Analytics Service, and we started that with VDI. But now that is expanding across the entire set of product portfolios from ShareFile, to NetScaler, Gateways, Load Balancers, et cetera. The idea is to unify all that data so that it is seamless to the customer. Now, that combines with all the analytics data coming out of the infrastructure to provide the customer with a one-pane-of-glass view.
It all comes down to taking advantage of the technology and progress we have made together to deliver insights and business benefits without jacking up the complexity that acts as a barrier to adoption.

Carlat: Using the data and analytics allow you to derive insights, and more accurate insights. We want to give a competitive leg up to our customers, clients, and partners. Those who have a leg up win more, make more money, are more efficient, and have happier clients. Therefore it all comes down to taking advantage, if you will, of the technology and the progress we have and pushing the edge of that envelope, bringing it into a package that delivers insights and business benefit without jacking up the complexity that makes it be a barrier to adoption.

Luna: You’re really empowering the customer to have better knowledge about their environment. And with better knowledge comes better performance in their manageability overall.

Gardner: Where are organizations leveraging the HPE-Citrix alliance in such a way that we can point to them and say, this is how it works?

Real-world success stories 

Carlat: One example is in engineering design. Imagine the amount of horsepower it takes in workstations to do computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). There’s solids modeling and major computational design elements. To purchase the infrastructure and have it at your desk can be quite expensive, and it can increase security risk.

Citrix and HPE have offerings, combined with our Edgeline and HCI systems, that provide the right experience, and really rich graphics and content. And we are able to provide that securely, with the data contained in a structured environment.

Luna: Another segment is healthcare. Because of HIPAA regulations, Citrix VDI is consumed in many healthcare organizations today, whether it’s large hospitals or clinics. That’s one of the environments where we see an opportunity to deliver on the power of both HPE and Citrix, by allowing that data to be secured and managed centrally yet providing the performance and the access on any device -- whether it’s the patient room, or the doctor’s clinic, or anywhere.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. As we seek to head off complexity, how will HPE OneSphere bolster your alliance?

Trusted together over time

Luna: We are always looking at innovating together. We are looking at the possibilities for joint work and development. HPE OneSphere presents an opportunity where we provide a single pane of glass view of customers as they look to deploy Citrix workloads. That could be through a central management plane, like OneSphere, or going onto a public cloud and being able to compare pricing and workloads.

It can also be about managing a hybrid cloud through HPE infrastructure, and managing all of that seamlessly, whether it’s in a private-hybrid cloud environment or through a public cloud and providing analytics. So we are continuing to look at those solutions that provide innovation for our customers.

Gardner: Jeff it seems that the opportunity to manage a multi-cloud world is certainly an attractive opportunity for you going out to alliance partners like Citrix.
Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance
Carlat: Yes, exactly. That’s an expectation of what consumers will be moving to in the future. It’s not a one-stop shop. We need to be agnostic. To me, HPE and Citrix are totally aligned to where we see the future going with regards to hybrid cloud. And by first having that commonality of strategy and vision, it just makes is easy to snap our stuff together and create these solutions that are delighting our customers.

Luna: I think at the end of the day our mission is to make Citrix hybrid cloud as best as possible on HPE gear and infrastructure, and that’s what we aim to deliver for our customers.

Gardner: And I suppose it’s important for us to point out that this isn’t a Johnny-come-lately relationship. You have been working together for some time. A great deal of the installed base for Citrix is on HPE kit.

Carlat: Yes, our relationship is built on 22 years of history between us. We’ve been blessed by customers desiring to land their infrastructure on HPE.

We have an installed base out there of customers who have chosen us in the past and continue to use us. For those customers, we want to provide them a seamless transformation to a new generation of architectures. The natural evolution is there for us to harvest, we just have to do it in ways that meet expectations around usability and experience.
A large portion of Citrix customers run today on HPE. That's a testament to the trust and collaboration within the partnership. It's been a good partnership.

Luna: A large portion of our customers today run their Citrix VDI environments on HPE infrastructure. That’s just a testament to the trust and the collaboration within the partnership. We have had innovation together over the years. That’s been collaboration between our teams, as well the leadership, in bringing new platforms and new solutions out to the marketplace. It’s been a good partnership.

Gardner: I’m afraid, we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how Citrix and HPE are specifically aligned to help bring digital transformation benefits to the market, and we’ve learned how aligning the core cloud and edge by new architectures and efficiencies is finally being made possible.

So, please join me in thanking our guests, Jim Luna, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Citrix. Thank you, Jim.

Luna: It was good to be here.

Gardner: And Jeff Carlat has been with us. He is the Senior Director for Global Alliances at HPE. Thanks, Jeff.

Carlat: You bet. Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks as well to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community -- and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile appDownload the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are aligned to bring new capabilities to the coalescing architectures around data center core, hybrid cloud, and edge computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Ericsson and HPE Accelerate Digital Transformation Via Customizable Mobile Business Infrastructure Stacks

Transcript of a discussion on how an Ericsson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise partnership establishes a mobile telecommunications stack that accelerates services delivery in emerging economies.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Gardner
Our next agile data center architecture attributes interview explores how an Ericsson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) partnership establishes a mobile telecommunications stack that accelerates data services in rapidly advancing economies.

We’ll now learn how this mobile business support infrastructure possesses a low-maintenance common core -- yet remains easily customizable for regional deployments just about anywhere. 

Here to help us define the unique challenges of enabling mobile telecommunications operators in countries such as Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, we are joined by Mario Agati, Program Director at Ericsson, based in Amsterdam. Welcome, Mario.

Mario Agati: Thank you very much.

Gardner: We are also here with Chris James-Killer, Sales Director for HPE. Welcome.

Chris James-Killer: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: What are the unique challenges that mobile telecommunications operators face when they go to countries like Bangladesh?

Agati
Agati: First of all, these are countries with a very low level of revenue per user (RPU). That means for them cost efficiency is a must. All of the solutions that are going to be implemented in those countries should be, as much as possible, focused on cost efficiency, reusability, and industrialization. That’s one of the main reasons for this program. We are addressing those types of needs -- of high-level industrialization and reusability across countries where cost-efficiency is king.

Gardner: In such markets, the technology needs to be as integrated as possible because some skill sets can be hard to come by. What are some of the stack requirements from the infrastructure side to make it less complex?

James-Killer: These can be very challenging countries, and it’s key to do the pre-work as systematically as you can. So, we work very closely with the architects at Ericsson to ensure that we have something that’s repeatable, that’s standardized and delivers a platform that can be rolled out readily in these locations.

Even countries such as Algeria are very difficult to get goods into, and so we have to work with customs, we have to work with goods transfer people; we have to work on local currency issues. It’s a big deal.
Learn More About the
HPE and Ericsson Alliance
Gardner: In a partnership like this between such major organizations as Ericsson and HPE, how do you fit together? Who does what in this partnership?

Agati: At Ericsson, we are the prime integrator responsible for running the overall digital transformation. This is for a global operator that is presently in multiple countries. It shows the complexity of such deals.

We are responsible for delivering a new, fully digital business support system (BSS). This is core for all of the telco services. It includes all of the business management solutions -- from the customer-facing front end, to billing, to charging, and the services provisioning.
In order to cope with this level of complexity, we at Ericsson rely on a number of partners that are helping us where we don’t have our own solutions. And, in this case, HPE is our selected partner for all of the infrastructure components. That’s how the partnership was born.

Gardner: From the HPE side, what are the challenges in bringing a data center environment to far-flung parts of the world? Is this something that you can do on a regional basis, with a single data center architecture, or do you have to be discrete to each market?

Your country, your data center


James-Killer: It is more bespoke than we would like. It’s not as easy as just sending one standard shipping container to each country. Each country has its own dynamic, its own specific users.

James-Killer
The other item worth mentioning is that each country needs its own data center environment. We can’t share them across countries, even if the countries are right next to each other, because there are laws that dictate this separation in the telecommunications world.

So there are unique attributes for each country. We work with Ericsson very closely to make sure that we remove as many itemized things as we can. Obviously, we have the technology platform standardized. And then we work out what’s additionally required in each country. Some countries require more of something and some countries require less. We make sure it’s all done ahead of time. Then it comes down to efficient and timely shipping, and working with local partners for installation.

Gardner: What is the actual architecture in terms of products? Is this heavily hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI)-oriented, and software-defined? What are the key ingredients that allow you to meet your requirements?

James-Killer: The next iterations of this will become a lot more advanced. It will leverage a composable infrastructure approach to standardize resources and ensure they are available to support required workloads. This will reduce overall cost, reduce complexity, and make the infrastructure more adaptable to the end customers’ business needs and how they change over time. Our HPE Synergy solution is a critical component of this infrastructure foundation.

At the moment we have to rely on what’s been standardized as a platform for supporting this BSS portfolio.
This platform has been established for years and years. So it is not necessarily on the latest technology ... but it's a good, standardized, virtualized environment to run this all in a failsafe way.

We have worked with Ericsson for a long time on this. This platform has been established for years and years. So it is not necessarily on the latest technology; the latest is being tested right now. For example, the Ericsson Karlskrona BSS team in Sweden is currently testing HPE Synergy. But, as we speak, the current platform is HPE Gen9 so it’s ProLiant Servers. HPE Aruba is involved; a lot of heavy-duty storage is involved as well.

But it’s a good, standardized, virtualized environment to run this all in a failsafe way. That’s really the most critical thing. Instead of being the most advanced, we just know that it will work. And Ericsson needs to know that it will work because this platform is critical to the end-users and how they operate within each country.

Gardner: These so-called IT frontiers countries -- in such areas as Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Indian subcontinent -- have a high stake in the success of mobile telecommunications. They want their economies to grow. Having a strong mobile communications and data communications infrastructure is essential to that. How do we ensure the agility and speed? How are you working together to make this happen fast?

Architect globally, customize locally


Agati: This comes back to the industrialization aspect. By being able to define a group-wide solution that is replicable in each of these countries, you are automatically providing a de facto solution in countries where it would be very difficult to develop locally. They obtain a complex, state-of-the-art core telco BSS solution. Thanks to this group initiative, we are able to define a strong set of capabilities and functions, an architecture that is common to all of the countries.

That becomes a big accelerator because the solution comes pre-integrated, pre-defined, and is just ready to be customized for whatever remains to be done locally. There are always aspects of the regulations that need to be taken care of locally. But you can start from a predefined asset that is already covering some 80 percent of your needs.
Learn More About the
HPE and Ericsson Alliance
In a relatively short time, in those countries, they obtain a state-of-the-art, brand-new, digital BSS solution that otherwise would have required a local and heavy transformation program -- with all of the complexity and disadvantages of that.

Gardner: And there’s a strong economic incentive to keep the total cost of IT for these BSS deployments at a low percentage of the carriers’ revenue.

Shared risk, shared reward


Agati: Yes. The whole idea of the digital transformation is to address different types of needs from the operator’s perspective. Cost efficiency is probably the biggest driver because it’s the one where the shareholders immediately recognize the value. There are other rationales for digital transformation, such as relating to the flexibility in the offering of new services and of embracing new business models related to improved customer experiences.

On the topic of cost efficiency, we have created with a global operator an innovative revenue-share deal. From our side, we commit to providing them a solution that enables them a certain level of operational cost reduction.

The current industry average cost of IT is 5 to 6 percent of total mobile carrier revenue. Now, thanks to the efficiency that we are creating from the industrialization and re-use across the entire operator’s group, we are committed to bringing the operational cost down to the level of around 2 percent. In exchange, we will receive a certain percentage of the operator’s revenue back.

That is for us, of course, a bold move. I need to say this clearly, because we are betting on our capability of not only providing a simple solution, but on also providing actual shareholder value, because that's the game we are actually playing in now.
It's a real quality of life issue ... These people need to be connected and haven't been connected before.

We are risking our own money on it at the end of the game. So that's what makes the big difference in this deal against any other deal that I have seen in my career -- and in any other deal that I have seen in this industry. There is probably no one that is really taking on such a huge challenge.

Gardner: It's very interesting that we are seeing shared risks, but then also shared rewards. It's a whole different way of being in an ecosystem, being in a partnership, and investing in big-stakes infrastructure projects.

Agati: Yes.

Gardner: There has been recent activity for your solutions in Bangladesh. Can you describe what's been happening there, and why that is illustrative of the value from this approach?

Bangladesh blueprint


Agati: Bangladesh is one of the countries in the pipeline, but it is not yet one of the most active. We are still working on the first implementation of this new stack. That will be the one that will set the parameters and become the template for all the others to come.

The logic of the transformation program is to identify a good market where we can challenge ourselves and deliver the first complete solution, and then reuse that solution for all of the others. This is what is happening now; we’re in the advanced stages of this pilot project.

Gardner: Yes, thank you. I was more referring to Bangladesh as an example of how unique and different each market can be. In this case, people often don't have personal identification; therefore, one needs to use a fingerprint biometric approach in the street to sell a SIM to get them up and running, for example. Any insight on that, Chris?
Learn More About the
HPE and Ericsson Alliance
James-Killer: It speaks to the importance of the work that Ericsson is doing in these countries. We have seen in Africa and in parts of the Middle East how important telecommunications is to an individual. It's a real quality of life issue. We take it for granted in Sweden; we certainly take advantage of it in my home country of Australia. But in some of these countries you are actually making a genuine difference.

These people need to be connected and haven’t been connected before. And you can see what has happened politically when the people have been exposed to this kind of technology. So it's admirable, I believe, what Ericsson is doing, particularly commercially, and the way that they are doing it.

It also speaks to Ericsson's success and the continued excitement around LTE and 4G in these markets; not actually 5G yet. When you visit Ericsson's website or go to Ericsson’s shows, there's a lot of talk about autonomous vehicles and working with Volvo and working with Scania, and the potential of 5G for smart cities initiatives. But some of the best work that Ericsson does is in building out the 4G networks in some of these frontier countries.

Agati: If I can add one thing. You mentioned how specific requirements are coming from such countries as Bangladesh, where we have the specific issue related to identity management. This is one of the big challenges we are now facing, of gaining the proper balance between coping with different local needs, such as different regulations, different habits, different cultures -- but at the same time also industrializing the means, making them repeatable and making that as simple as possible and as consistent as possible across all of these countries.

There is a continuous battle between the attempts to simplify and the reality check on what does not always allow simplification and industrialization. That is the daily battle that we are waging: What do you need and what don’t you need. Asking, “What is the business value behind a specific capability? What is the reasoning behind why you really need this instead of that?”
We at Ericsson want to be the champion of simplicity and this project is the cornerstone of going in that direction.

At the end of the game, this is the bet that we are making together with our customers -- that there is a path to where you can actually find the right way to simplification. Ericsson has recently been launching our new brand and it is about this quest for making it easier. That's exactly our challenge. We want to be the champion of simplicity and this project is the cornerstone of going in that direction.

Gardner: And only a global integrator with many years of experience in many markets can attain that proper combination of simplicity and customization.

Agati: Yes.

Gardner: I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how an Ericsson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise partnership has established a mobile telecommunications stack that accelerates data services in fast-emerging economies. And we have learned how this mobile BSS infrastructure creates a low-maintenance common core, yet remains easily customizable.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Mario Agati, Program Director at Ericsson. Thank you, sir.

Agati: Thank you very much to all who have been listening to us.

Gardner: And we have also been here with Chris James-Killer, Sales Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thank you, sir.

James-Killer: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how an Ericsson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise partnership establishes a mobile telecommunications stack that accelerates services delivery in emerging economies. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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