Ericsson Executive Q&A: Rory Read

Read was appointed head of Business Area Global Communications Platform upon its formation in July 2022, following the completion of Ericsson’s acquisition of enterprise cloud communications company, Vonage. Read has been CEO of Vonage since July 2020.

1. This is the first MWC since Ericsson completed the acquisition of Vonage. Can you reiterate what value Vonage brings to Ericsson – for the benefit of those who follow Ericsson closely?

I’ll start by sharing a high-level overview of the Vonage Communications Platform (VCP). VCP includes our Unified Communications as a Service - UCaaS, Contact Center as a Service - CCaaS, and Conversational Commerce applications as well as our Communication Platform as a Service programmable APIs, which we refer to as CPaaS. Through VCP, we are powering our customers' connections, conversations and engagement with their customers and employees. Built using an API-first strategy, VCP is a highly scalable global platform, which is easy for developers to use.

Vonage has a large global developer base and a large base of enterprise customers. Our customers are in nearly every industry in geographies all over the world. Our core business today is helping Ericsson to expand into the enterprise space.

Today we are seeing how the convergence of the internet, mobility, cloud and powerful 5G networks combined with programmable APIs is driving rapid acceleration in digital transformation and changing how businesses communicate, connect and engage - across industries and around the world. As this transformation continues, we see transactions and notifications moving to two-way conversations and then to 360 degree immersive engagement. The combination of Vonage’s CPaaS and Ericsson’s powerful 5G network will enable this, and be exposed to developers through Vonage’s platform. 

This combination of 5G capabilities and network APIs uniquely positions us to spearhead the creation of a global network platform for open innovation, driving revenue benefits to the full wireless eco-system - CSPs, enterprises and developers - through new, advanced use cases. CSPs will also benefit from white-labeling and reselling Vonage’s UCaaS and CCaaS and existing APIs to their enterprise customers.

This provides new ways for CSPs to monetize the 5G networks they’ve invested in while also opening up new revenue streams for Ericsson.

2. Conversely, as Vonage remains as a brand, what value does the rest of Ericsson bring to the operation?

Today, VCP enables use cases that advance digital transformation for better connections, conversations and engagements. 5G capabilities need to be available to developers and enterprises to embed in more advanced use cases, and this will occur through open network APIs.

Ericsson’s 5G capabilities, network leadership and engineering scale, combined with Vonage's knowledge and leadership in cloud communications, enables creation of new applications by putting the power of the network at the fingertips of developers to capture new market opportunities.

Together, Vonage and Ericsson will leverage our respective strengths to help CSPs monetize network investments, user experience and growth opportunities with new network APIs and enable advanced 5G use cases like cloud gaming, connected vehicles, remote patient monitoring and more. By unlocking the power of the network, these kinds of engagements can become democratized and widely available around the world.

3. Have you had any customer feedback about the acquisition? If so, can you give us a flavor?

We’ve already had positive feedback from Vonage customers who are excited to see how joining Ericsson will help to accelerate innovation and empower both our internal product and engineering teams and the global developer community to create new applications and use cases that enhance engagement for customers and employees.

And customers know that we are driving continued innovation on Vonage’s UCaaS, CCaaS, and conversational commerce applications, as well as adding new Communications APIs to help them create new digital experiences for better communications, connections and engagement.

CSPs are excited about having access to Vonage’s GTM expertise, enterprise customer and developer bases, and the ability to white-label and resell Vonage’s existing solutions. And by unleashing the power of the network, Vonage and Ericsson will enable developers around the world to capture new market opportunities, and the use cases I mentioned that are enabled by 5G network APIs - like cloud gaming, connected vehicles and remote patient monitoring.

We have built a cross-functional team working across Vonage and Ericsson to do this. And we are going to leverage our combined GTM expertise and capabilities to help CSPs become network as a service providers.

We are already engaged with more than 50 CSPs around the world who are looking to us to help enable this for them and we have numerous meetings with them at MWC to talk about the value of working together.

There is so much opportunity and we are excited about being a first mover to capture it.

4. When can we expect the first major business successes to result from the acquisition?

We have been laser focused on driving value from the combination of Vonage and Ericsson, laying the foundation for the global network platform, and we’ve shared some exciting news already this week.

In collaboration with Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone, we presented how advanced mobile network functionality can be exposed and made easily consumable by the global developer community. This was an exciting milestone to demonstrate our collective ambition to accelerate innovation by opening up the new generation of mobile networks and exposing advanced network functionalities for app-developers and enterprises under the framework of the GSMA Open Gateway initiative.

And Ericsson/Vonage was named as a partner in Microsoft’s announcement this week about its Azure Programmable Connectivity.

We continue to make strong progress on the development of our Global Network Platform and network APIs. Expect more announcements about this in the coming months.

5. What are Business Area Global Communications Platform’s priorities for the year ahead?

For Vonage, we will continue to execute our strategy for our core business, which remains squarely focused on powering our customers’ communications, conversations, and engagement through our global Vonage Communications Platform, delivering best-in-class, secure and scalable cloud solutions across APIs, unified communications, contact center and conversational commerce. We are uniquely positioned to provide customers and partners with the most comprehensive set of engagement solutions in our industry to create personalized, meaningful connections that build loyalty.

For our Global Network Platform, we remain focused on building new capabilities using the power of the network in combination with Vonage’s CPaaS that aims to transform the way advanced 5G network capabilities are exposed, consumed and paid for.

We are also focused on executing on the broader Ericsson strategy to leverage technology leadership to grow its mobile network business and expand into enterprise and find new ways to monetize network investments.

We expect the demand for new services, innovations and value creation enabled by 5G to grow significantly over the coming years. This will come from the network capabilities, which were so far hidden behind things like quality of service, network slicing, and device management. These are all core components of the network, but they haven’t been exposed yet.

Ericsson and Vonage are accelerating execution of the GNP strategy in 2023, increasing investments in GNP across R&D and go to market. We are making very good progress in our partnership discussions with CSPs.

6. What is Business Area Global Communications Platform/Vonage hoping to achieve at MWC 2023?

Our presence here will help enterprises and CSPs understand what we can do for them as we demonstrate how advanced mobile network functionality can be exposed and made easily consumable by the global developer community who will use these 5G network APIs to innovate new applications and features for any device that benefits from connection to the network. We are also demonstrating our core UCaaS and CCaaS solutions and our Communications APIs on the Vonage Communications Platform. All provide new ways for CSPs to monetize the 5G networks they’ve invested in.

We are excited to introduce ourselves to the MWC community as part of Ericsson, and connect with analysts and media to share our strategy and progress to capitalize on the immense opportunities ahead and the unique value that Vonage and Ericsson together can bring to the industry.

We are well positioned to be a first mover in the creation of a global network platform for innovation, and leaders of the next wave of the communications revolution - and we’re here to share our vision of the future and our strategy for executing on that vision.

Feel welcome to join the #ericssonmwc conversation at #mwc23