Ericsson and Cisco have announced new joint customer engagements and offerings building on their next-generation strategic partnership announced in November 2015.
The duo announced Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they will join forces with Intel to develop what they expect will be the industry’s first 5G router for business and residential services.
As members of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, Cisco, Ericsson and Intel are partnering with Verizon within an ecosystem to accelerate the pace of critical 5G innovations, the companies said in a joint statement.
Ericsson and Cisco have also accelerated work on their joint go-to-market models and sales force training, and are examining opportunities in six strategic areas - IP core, fixed cable broadband access, business VPN, mobile backhaul, IP transformation services and IP & IT managed services - as well as smart cities, with the potential to collaborate on IoT technology development.
In addition to these partnership developments, the two companies have also signed a joint intellectual property rights agreement, as well as a professional services agreement. The latter will leverage a combination of 66,000 Ericsson and 11,000 Cisco services employees to provide consulting, systems integration, support and managed services across IT and networks in 180 countries.
Hans Vestberg, president and CEO, Ericsson, said: "I'm excited about the feedback from the customers and from the sales force when we present our joint capabilities. It is clear that our two companies approach this partnership with the same commitment and will to execute."
Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco, said: "In today's fast-paced world, next generation strategic partnerships allow us to innovate and move with greater speed. Since announcing our partnership with Ericsson in November, we have great momentum resulting in cost-effective solutions, improved experiences, and faster time to market for our customers."
As part of a cooperation encompassing intellectual property, the two companies also launched the Ericsson Dynamic Service Manager.
The product enables service providers to dynamically configure, monitor and optimize the network resources available to applications in multi-vendor, multi-domain network environments. It focuses on multi-vendor mobile backhaul, IP core, and enterprise VPNs, the companies said.
At Mobile World Congress, Ericsson will demonstrate use cases for Ericsson Dynamic Service Manager that illustrate the complete lifecycle of a typical network service that originates as a business request. General availability of this product is expected in second half of 2016.