How Ericsson and AWS are accelerating digital transformation and AI innovation in OSS/BSS

Ericsson and AWS recently renewed their strategic collaboration extending cloud benefits to various Ericsson OSS/BSS offerings across core commerce, monetization, orchestration, data, analytics, and AI. The combined power of Ericsson’s industry-leading OSS/BSS offerings with AWS Cloud expertise will help transform telecom operations, accelerate AI and Gen-AI innovation and foster business success. Mats Karlsson, Vice President and Head of Business and Operations Systems at Ericsson and Fabio Cerone, General Manager for EMEA Telco at AWS discuss the strategic collaboration and value it provides to CSPs.

Modernizing OSS/BSS and embracing cloud journey with confidence

"CSPs realize the critical role OSS/BSS plays in telecom operations and long-term business success. Hence, they are focussing on modernizing their OSS/BSS to achieve better operational and business efficiency and stay competitive. At Ericsson, we are making the journey to OSS/BSS modernization easier for CSPs through our collaboration with AWS," explains Mats Karlsson, Vice President and head of business and operations systems at Ericsson.

"Working with AWS allows us to offer CSPs a suite of telecom solutions that are not only innovative but also scalable and secure. By combining Ericsson’s cutting-edge OSS/BSS offerings and AWS’s industry-leading cloud services, we're able to help CSPs modernize their infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately drive better business outcomes." Mats added, reiterating the value this collaboration provides to CSPs.

Mats points out that the strategic collaboration is about more than just delivering software and infrastructure. "It's about enabling CSPs to fully embrace their cloud journey with confidence," he says. "Our recently renewed strategic collaboration with AWS will certify various Ericsson OSS/BSS offerings on AWS, spanning across core commerce, monetization, orchestration, data analytics, and AI domains. As a certified AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) partner, Ericsson enables CSPs to leverage globally validated deployments, allowing them to dynamically scale operations to meet real-time demands. This means faster service delivery, reduced operational costs, and enhanced business agility."

Figure 1: Ericsson OSS/BSS and AWS deliver new value for CSPs

 

Maximizing the value of cloud investment

Fabio Cerone, General Manager for EMEA Telco at AWS, echoes Mats’s sentiments. "AWS is committed to being the most secure and reliable cloud platform for CSPs," he states. "Our collaboration with Ericsson allows us to offer a comprehensive suite of tools and services that streamline network and business operations. With this strategic collaboration, CSPs can focus on innovation rather than worrying about managing software and infrastructure."

Mats adds that embracing cloud for OSS/BSS can help CSPs unlock the full potential of their AWS investment. “CSPs can take advantage of cloud-native OSS/BSS software, generative AI innovations, infrastructure-as-code, autoscaling, and managed cloud services to enable new business use cases. It helps to close the gaps between network/IT operations and the business to drive new efficiencies while strengthening agility and speed to market.”

Cerone highlights another crucial point, "Security and compliance are also top priorities. AWS is architected to be the most secure global cloud infrastructure on which to build, migrate, and manage applications and workloads. Millions of customers, including the most security sensitive organizations like government, healthcare, and financial services, trust AWS.” He adds “Ericsson, in collaboration with AWS, provides end-to-end security that covers application, environment, and processes. With our secure global infrastructure, CSPs can automate security controls and monitor compliance with ease. This is crucial for CSPs operating in sensitive sectors like government and healthcare.”

 

The strategic collaboration in practice

Acknowledging the benefits and combined powers of Ericsson and AWS, many CSPs are already benefitting from this collaboration to bring cloud transformation to their OSS/BSS. 

For example, Odido has successfully transformed the billing experience for its B2B and B2C mobile customers in the Netherlands by migrating to the cloud-native Ericsson Billing platform hosted on AWS. The migration transitioned 5 million customers over a single weekend, with zero faults. This achievement allows Odido to offer innovative 5G services, including the newly launched Klik&Klaar fixed-wireless access (FWA) solution, with improved operational efficiency and customer experience.

In reference to this success story, Mats explained “Odido’s transition to Ericsson Billing, hosted on AWS, provides a future-proof solution that enhances automation, improves billing accuracy, and enables the company to scale new services efficiently. The open solution not only transforms Odido’s IT capabilities but also offers the agility to support future growth and technology advancements, while reducing operating costs.”

Read the Odido Netherlands Ericsson and AWS press release.

In another successful migration, a European mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deployed Ericsson Mediation on AWS as part of a broader, forward-thinking cloud strategy to enhance operational capabilities and ensure market competitiveness. The cloud-native design of Ericsson Mediation facilitated seamless deployment and showcased that it is a performance tested, certified, and future proofed solution. The collaboration between Ericsson and AWS resulted in product maturity, future proofing, verified deployment, and enhanced product offerings.

 

Accelerating AI and generative AI innovation

The conversation turns to the transformative potential of AI and generative AI, which is another exciting aspect of the renewed Ericsson and AWS collaboration. "AI is no longer just a buzzword; it's a powerful tool for transformation," Cerone asserts. "With Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and Amazon SageMaker, we're enabling CSPs to move from experimentation to industrialization of AI applications."

"Together, Ericsson and AWS are helping CSPs fast-track their AI innovation by facilitating AI and generative AI applications to augment OSS/BSS.” Mats elaborates on this point, “At Ericsson, we have developed an offering called Ericsson Telco IT AI Apps, that provides CSPs cloud-native AI and generative AI applications designed to enhance OSS/BSS features and improve their observability. By leveraging data from Ericsson products such as Billing, Charging, Mediation, Expert Analytics, Catalog Manager, Order Care, Orchestration, and more, Ericsson Telco IT AI Apps provide customer, operations and service insights to CSPs.”

In BSS, the AI generated insights help to reduce revenue leakage and drive sales. In OSS, the AI applications provide network insights facilitating network health visibility. For CSP operations teams, the AI applications offer predictive insights to reduce outages and improve service quality.

Watch Dr Ishwar Parulkar, CTO, Telecom and Edge at AWS and Mats Karlsson, Vice President and Head of Business and Operations Systems at Ericsson talk about transforming the performance of OSS and BSS through AI and automation at a recent analyst and partner day at the Ericsson D-15 Innovation Center in Santa Clara, California.

 

Ericsson generative AI framework and support from AWS

Mats is especially excited about the swift growth of generative AI applications in OSS/BSS in recent years. “We have developed an Ericsson generative AI framework for OSS/BSS that provides a strong foundation for rapid development of generative AI applications to keep pace with growing market needs.”

Figure 2: Ericsson OSS/BSS generative AI framework

 

“The generative AI framework helps generative AI applications seamlessly integrate with Ericsson OSS/BSS products through a client layer that acts as a receiver microservice,” he adds.

At its core the framework comprises of a generative AI engine which includes Retrieval Augmented Generation operations (RAGOps), Large Language Model operations (LLMOps), an orchestration layer for coordination of AI tasks and processes, and a storage layer for managing data storage and retrieval efficiently.

Sharing more detail, Mats says, “Our generative AI framework emphasizes reusability and accelerates AI use case development with pre-integrated telco knowledge kits. These kits and Ericsson's proprietary insights combine telecom knowledge sources, including TM Forum (TMF) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards. This allows operators to quickly combine these resources with their data, reducing the time-to-market for new services.”

Security has been a key focus area in the generative AI framework, with a multi-layered security approach to mitigate risks such as adversarial attacks, model inversion, and data poisoning. Ethical considerations are integral, with built-in guardrails to ensure compliance with ethical standards and regulations. Furthermore, the generative AI framework continuously monitors performance metrics, providing automated alerts for anomalies to maintain optimal customer experience.

The generative AI framework provides flexibility to integrate with various open source and commercial foundation models.

The standard UI front-end exposes generative AI use cases, and service delivery agents automate activities performed by Ericsson OSS/BSS Services teams.

“This comprehensive generative AI framework provides a resilient base to scale and accelerate generative AI application development,” concludes Mats.

But how is AWS supporting Ericsson’s OSS/BSS AI vision? Cerone explains, “The key toolsets that are helping Ericsson to accelerate AI innovation and support the generative AI framework are Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and Amazon SageMaker. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service which gives access to multiple foundation models through API calls. It enables the creation of knowledge bases for combining various data sources to easily build RAG models. It also provides security and privacy guardrails and policies to ensure that models work in the expected manner. Application developers can evaluate models, experimenting with models and picking the right one for their purposes. Amazon SageMaker is a toolkit which provides access to multiple open-source models. It helps developers choose the right model and has recipes to build machine learning applications.”

“Essentially, these two toolsets make it easy for application developers to navigate various foundation models, pick the right model, bring in the right data sources, create agentic workflows, and apply policies of security, privacy, and explainability”, he concludes.

 

AI in action

The Ericsson and AWS collaboration in AI is already well-established. Mats shares the example of an intelligent invoice anomaly detection application introduced last year. “Our intelligent invoice anomaly detection application leverages generative AI Variation Autoencoder (VAE) to transform large amounts of complex invoice data into an understandable form, detecting billing anomalies more accurately and swiftly. The application leverages Amazon SageMaker for machine learning operations (MLOps).” In agreement, Cerone quickly adds, “Amazon SageMaker plays an integral role in this application, streamlining the machine learning workflow and accelerating both development and deployment.”

Read more about Ericsson VAE-powered intelligent invoice anomaly detection in this solution brief “Transform invoice anomaly detection with AI smart encoders”.

 

At TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World event in 2024, Ericsson demonstrated intent-driven service management with AWS. Generative AI can automate the translation of intent into TM Forum specifications, commands, and actionable steps, continuously monitoring network performance, and dynamically adjusting the network to meet desired outcomes. The use case was supported by Amazon Bedrock. View the demonstration in the following video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu8hmFiWI4k

 

CSPs and their end customers will benefit from ongoing Ericsson and AWS collaboration progress

Mats concludes, "The collaboration between Ericsson and AWS is about more than technology—it's about empowering CSPs to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. By combining Ericsson’s telecom expertise with AWS’s cloud leadership, CSPs can unlock their full potential, drive new efficiencies, and embrace a future of enhanced customer experiences."

The collaboration between Ericsson and AWS is a game-changer for CSPs looking to modernize and innovate. By integrating cutting-edge technologies and leveraging industry expertise, CSPs can transform their operations, improve business outcomes, and build a loyal customer base in today’s competitive telecom landscape.

OSS/BSS evolution for successful 5G monetization

 

Read more:

• Telecom analytics: transform data into action
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• Service orchestration for better service quality
• Superb telecom customer experience
• OSS/BSS Services for better business outcomes
• OSS/BSS solutions to maximize business efficiency
• Ericsson and AWS partner to support CSPs on their journey to cloud BSS