Charting the path toward the platform economy
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ericsson’s CTO tech trends article series whose purpose is to anticipate technology evolution, highlight driving use cases, and, in more recent years, flesh out those use cases with business innovation. Today, with the telecom industry on the cusp of a massive transformation toward a platform economy, service innovation is a top priority.
To ensure the cost efficiency, sustainability and trustworthiness of the high-performing networks that will soon be required, Ericsson has prepared a powerful toolbox equipped with a developer platform, network APIs, network exposure and network slicing, in order to enable differentiated services.
This year’s tech trends article, on page 26 of this issue of the magazine, explains the key trends driving the evolution of high-performing networks:
- Using network programmability to enable service differentiation
- Leveraging telecom AI to boost programmability
- Transitioning toward a network architecture with horizontal layers to improve and expand capabilities
- Pursuing innovations over the next decade that enhance performance, sustainability and security.
The seven other articles contained in this issue cover topics ranging from energy efficiency and intent-based service management to cloud-native observability and hybrid core network architecture. We have also included an article that explores the new opportunities available on the 6G platform.
The 6G platform will further expand the scope of networks beyond communication services to support the services needed by applications, which are at the center of the digital transformation. Applications will benefit from the 6G platform by gaining easy access to network capabilities and a wide range of service APIs. CSPs will benefit from an expanded role in the ecosystem with new possibilities for monetization higher up in the value chain. Consumers will benefit from improved quality of experience. The article on page 47 presents the 6G platform concept, demonstrates how services are exposed as application programming interfaces and concludes with a promising use case example.
It is increasingly clear to everyone in our industry that autonomous networks have great potential to reduce network operation costs and open up lucrative opportunities to address new customer segments and business cases that would benefit from flexible, scalable and customizable service offers. We believe that the introduction of intent into service management is a critical step on the path toward the creation of autonomous networks. To ensure a cost-efficient transition, we recommend the implementation of intent-based service management for a prioritized subset of services where communication service providers expect intent to have the greatest business impact, while continuing to handle other services in the traditional way. Find out more by reading the article on page 19.
We hope you enjoy this issue of our magazine and that you will share our insights with your colleagues and business partners. You can find both PDF and HTML versions of all the articles at: www.ericsson.com/ericsson-technology-review
