BARCELONA: Telecom equipment maker Ericsson and chipmaker Intel have agreed a partnership deal to help network operator customers build datacentres, putting them on a more competitive footing against big, cloud-based Internet firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
"We will build datacentre equipment which will actually have the same performance as many of the big cloud providers are doing for themselves," Ericsson's chief executive, Hans Vestberg, told a news conference at the Mobile World Congress telecoms trade show in Barcelona on Monday.
Ericsson, the world's leading maker of mobile network equipment, said it will help its global base of major telecoms companies to shift to cloud computing using Intel datacentre designs to compete more actively with Web rivals. No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed.
Over the past decade Web-based services like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have stopped buying finished computers, storage devices and network components and instead developed their own systems in-house to create massive, low-cost datacentres in the cloud to serve billions of users.
Ericsson's partnership with Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, puts it in a crowded market for providing bespoke datacentres, where it will also be competing with a range of technology suppliers including Cisco and IBM.
The Swedish company's plan is to focus initially on equipping big telecom operators rather than competing for new corporate customers in other industries, its CEO said.
Telecom operators are rushing to build datacentres in the cloud to slash the cost of hardware spending within their networks, improve the range of services they offer subscribers and to obtain the Web-wide reach of the big Internet companies.
"The difference is that we are going to provide it to the market," Vestberg said. "This is predominately to see that we give a competitive edge for our customers, the carriers."
The move builds on a number of smaller cloud software company acquisitions made by Ericsson over the past year.
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