Sabri, Lucky, thanks for joining us
at AWS Studio Mobile World Congress.
We are going to have this conversation
talking about innovation that we have already done,
but innovation that three players like AWS, e&,
and Ericsson we can do together.
Let me start just telling us something
about e& and these big changes that e& is doing
from from a telco to a tech company.
Etisalat recently rebranded its name to e&.
We operate in 16 countries across Middle East and Africa.
We provide telecommunication services
and also digital services for both consumer enterprises.
Okay, thank you.
And Lucky, everyone knows Ericsson,
but specifically your area,
what are you doing in terms of innovation
and the cloud adoption?
Thanks, Mauro, and thanks for having us here.
I head up cloud and software services
in Middle East and Africa,
and essentially we are driving ICT solutions
across the board, across the BSS/OSS
core network perspective, the ADM IT services,
and everything that operates across the network.
We're going through a large period, as you know,
with the introduction of 5G
and the proliferation of 5G around our market area
with great success.
And Sabri, we did the first project together
with Ericsson in terms of BSS transformation
and moving some BSS workload to the cloud.
How do you think that is important
for you to have AWS and Ericsson joining forces together
in terms of, let me say, being confident
that this kind of journey is going in the right direction?
Well, in the past we deployed a large multitude
of back office application in the cloud,
and it worked quite well.
It helped us to bring world-class innovation rapidly
to our end users.
But when it comes to the telecom
critical mission applications like the charging system,
the product catalog, and the core network,
it's very important that we verify
and test thoroughly those application in the cloud.
So I think having AWS and Ericsson working together
to verify these application and to industrialize
the whole product portfolio is extremely important.
So we see it quite positive and it serves
telecom service providers like Etisalat or e& quite well.
And Lucky, from your point of view, how is it important
to Ericsson on the cloud services
to have a very, very strong relationship
with AWS, joining forces to provide the best solution
for our customers?
We are firm believers
in open architecture and infrastructure,
very much that each of the service providers
and ecosystem players are going to need flexibility
in the options that are made available
when it comes to infrastructure.
Many, many various benefits from doing that.
So it's super important
that we can work with infrastructure providers
and services providers like AWS
so that we can address e&'s international opco requirements.
Time to market, flexibility, and coverage.
Coverage in terms of the speed at which we can move
the software development lifecycle, the testing lifecycle.
And at the end of the day, we really want
to make end consumers provision those services,
use those services, and benefit from those services
as soon as we can.
So it's immensely important.
Sabri, as you said, Etisalat is a big group
covering 16 different countries
around Middle East and Africa,
and for sure it is not easy to have the same strategy
and the same execution across all the entire group.
So what is the approach that you are using
to have a solution that doesn't fit for all the opcos,
but will allow to the group to maintain one strategy
across the group?
Yes.
Well, we've decided to adopt a hybrid,
multi-cloud architecture
and to partner with players like AWS
where you can provide different architecture
to fit different demands.
So like the Outpost, the Local Zone, and the Region.
In the areas where we have a requirement to comply
to certain data sovereignty,
Outpost is one of the architecture that we've recommended
for our international opcos.
And also have the zone and the region,
as you're aware, in UAE, we've implemented
the Region architecture, while Local Zone
is being explored in other places.
Thank you. And Lucky,
talking about data regulation and data sovereignty,
we know is one of the biggest obstacles that we have
in terms of cloud adoption
and we need to find the right balance between the regulation
and the security that each country is requesting
and the innovation that is driving it to move to the cloud.
How do you think that is the synthesis
between these two factors in terms of balancing the security
and allowing the innovation to go through?
We are a firm believer, again,
in the multi-hybrid cloud concept.
And essentially, the synthesis will come
from the flexibility in the options
that we can give service providers.
The synthesis comes in the understanding
of the data sovereignty requirements.
That's why we believe there's always going to be
some type of instance of on-premises,
and there'll always be some type of instance
of distributing the compute storage
throughout the network as well.
And the opportunity to work with industry players
like AWS and e& gives us the ability
to prove that it does work,
that we can cater for regulatory requirements
around secure data, securing the potentially subscriber data
doesn't move across borders.
But then data that's not so requirement
from a secure perspective,
then we can handle that in the right way as well.
And I think in Egypt we did a great proof point in that,
that we could actually also take certain workloads
that maybe they weren't online requirements,
maybe we could process offline,
or maybe latency wasn't the key requirement.
So we could prove that in a particular way using VPN, etc.
So for us, the synthesis comes from the options
that we can give service providers in that sense.
In Egypt, we started with the DevTest.
There were not any restriction to verify the concept.
[Lucky] Exactly. [Sabri] Yeah.
[Lucky] And product catalog as well as you know.
[Mauro] We started with test and dev that was, let me say,
a safe environment without any, let me say,
affect detected in terms of regulation.
Where do you think that, again,
being compliant with the regulation, we can move forward
in terms of BSS transformation to the cloud?
And when do you think that we should stop
because we are going against the law and the regulations?
Yeah.
I mean, basically we've decided
just to divide the BSS landscape into different layers.
For back office application,
especially in the modules
where we don't have any sensitive data,
the idea is to move to the cloud,
to benefit from all the advanced features
and the continuous development and enhancements.
In the area where we have the CRM,
I call it the industry generic application
like the CRM analytics, e-commerce,
we have the hybrid architecture
in which the engine and the logic,
can be in the cloud, wherever it is.
But when it comes to customer data, it'll be on-prem
if the regulation requires it.
And then we have the telecom specific application
like the charging and so on, in which the requirement here
is not only being compliant,
but also ensuring the performance and availability.
And for that one, the current partnership
between AWS and Ericsson is very helpful
to verify those applications,
and gradually, to move it to the cloud.
But some application will continue to be on-prem
due to stringent performance requirements.
So I think it's a journey.
It needs to be gradual and I think the rules and the law
would need to evolve gradually.
I think to Sabri's point as well,
it's not just a regulatory consideration
but very much also performance.
Certain workloads you want to run on premises
for different reasons, but also resilience.
You want to be able to have resiliency options
or redundancy options that give you flexibility also
in how you recover and manipulate the solution
to cater for the local environment.
I think those three together, the regulatory,
the resilience and the performance are absolutely key
on where you want to place the workloads.
And even the cloud is becoming more distributed.
You have this central cloud,
then you have the private, the edge, the far edge.
So I think the technology is evolving.
[Mauro] It's evolving.
[Sabri] It's evolving.
And it'll help also to cater for the performance requirement
and for the regulatory at the same time
Where in two years from now,
you would like to see this collaboration
between AWS and Ericsson, let me say,
landing in terms of the journey to the cloud for you?
I think the POC that we run in Egypt,
it was a good starting point.
We'll start with the product catalog and also the DevTest.
I think in the next two years,
we would like to see other elements within the Ericsson BSS
moving or having the option to be on-prem or in the cloud.
And I think that can evolve also to include core
or the packet core in the future,
and maybe part of the radio access.
And Lucky, what do you expect
from a partner like AWS, let me say,
to evolve this partnership in the next few years?
What should we do or what should we do better
than today in terms of partnership?
I think we've already started on a good footing.
So let's just say that this was a great proof point
that when we collaborate together,
we can prove that the technology can evolve
and it can give operators like e&
and the entire group options.
At the end of the day,
this is what we're trying to provide business options.
What we're expecting is the same spirit,
to help us to evolve our solutions.
Ericsson's very much a believer, I said before,
in the multi-hybrid cloud concept,
but we also write all of our solutions, all of our software
to work on any infrastructure.
In that sense, the wealth of knowledge and experience
that AWS has in those deployments is absolutely crucial
for us to also learn and to be able to cater for those
as we go through to customer environments.
And that customer experience and the learning
that you can get from different deployments,
but also the considerations we talked about earlier,
the resiliency, the performance, the security.
If we're evolving together,
if we're evolving for specific requirements,
UAE has one particular requirement that Egypt is different,
and then various other countries around the region
are also having different considerations.
And I think when we work together,
we work far more effectively to address those.
And we should be able, let me say, to localize
and to globalize only localizing, correct?
[Sabri] Yeah.
[Mauro] So we cannot address the entire group
just with one single approach,
but we need to identify what are the specific requirements.
[Sabri] And to have an extensible architecture
that can cater for different needs.
[Lucky] That's a great point.
Scaling our success is important.
I know e& and Sabri, you are very keen to say,
if we can prove something in Egypt also,
how can you utilize it
across the rest of the operating companies?
It's the same with our partnership with AWS.
We love to see where else we can scale these solutions
in a cost-effective, go-to-market effective manner as well.
I think it's great that we industrialize that experience.
I talk about industrialization
because that's really when we're being able
to give the market a real true benefit in that sense.
Sabri, we started the journey in terms of innovation
with the project in Egypt.
There is something that we did in terms of innovation
and something that probably we should do
in the next months and years.
What do you consider that was the biggest innovation
that we implemented on this project
and what do you expect is going to happen in the future?
The main thing that we did
is we deployed the Ericsson product catalog
in AWS public cloud, basically.
It's a POC that we did, so basically it helped
to create more innovative service offering,
bundling telecom and non-telecom services.
And also it shortened the time to market
and it provides enhanced operational efficiency as well.
So that's what we did so far as a POC.
We would like to extend that to include other elements
within the Ericsson BSS portfolio.
I think together we took a lot of learnings
out of that proof of concept.
When it comes to time to market,
reduced it by 65%, as you recall.
And then from a total cost of ownership perspective,
I think e& was reporting 16% reduction.
And that's just on the deployment that we made.
We saw that the benefits were there,
they could be realized.
We catered for the security requirements by VPN usage.
We knew that there wasn't secure data
that was being transferred,
there was a particular piece that we were proving.
So from that perspective, we also start to understand
the regulations far deeper
and how we can cater for that as well.
I think it's safe to say
that we took a lot of learnings also around how we set up.
[Sabri] How we created the setup, yeah.
[Lucky] Yeah, as a partnership it worked really effectively.
But to get it going is very different
than the traditional partnerships that we've had before.
I think just signing the agreements
took longer than the actual proof of concept itself.
That sense, it leads to how we should cooperate
in the future.
And the same setup can be reused
to verify other capabilities as well.
Yes.
Yeah, also, the contractual part is part of the long journey
that we are starting and where we are learning.
Thanks a lot for joining us.
Just for the last few words
about what is the biggest learning
that everyone should take in count
in terms of cloud adoption.
Just few words on this.
Yeah.
I think working very closely as partners
is extremely important.
Also the experimentation, trying different things.
And to us, at least,
the benefit of cloud became much more clearer to our opco
having elastic infrastructure,
providing the tools for the developers
to create new offering rapidly.
And also we trained some of the software developers.
They're going through the certification process within AWS.
For us, we realize very clearly it is a paradigm shift.
Not necessarily just isolated to the technology,
but also how we collaborate.
I mentioned earlier around the contracting.
But it's also how you set up for that complexity,
how you work through each of those challenges.
And I think this is a great example of a partnership
that really can realize benefits.
So we're really looking forward to the future.
Thanks, Sabri. Thanks, Lucky.
Thanks for joining us.
[Sabri] Thank you. [Lucky] Thank you.