I can’t be the only one who is ready to start hearing about the interesting interactions between 5G and all the other industries and technologies which it’s going to transform. Well, it looks like we’re going to start getting our wish, and it’s happening with an interesting 5G cloud services platform coming out of a partnership between Telefónica and Pente.
According to a recent announcement, Telefónica has teamed up with Pente, an enterprise cellular 4G/5G platform provider, to create and deploy a new managed 5G Cloud service using Pente’s packet core solution. The solution is designed to pair the speed and power of 5G with the versatility of the cloud to automate integration delivery, operations and integration. Of course, the partners are offering services to enhance and enable these capabilities, in addition to providing a simple digital view of the service for customers.
This pairing of technologies will drive an explosion of other 5G-plus-something integrations, within the as-a-service economy especially.
Pente and Telefónica said that they embarked upon the partnership to develop the 5G Cloud because they saw the convergence of IoT, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence driving a new wave of transformation for industries and enterprises. It’s exciting to see IoT companies partnering on these kinds of forward-thinking initiatives, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this one leads to more innovation.
The new structure created by the partners here will require high-performance and secure wireless connectivity, millisecond-grade latency, and the capability to control where data is stored and acted upon. The combination of 5G and local edge computing will meet these needs, the companies said, while pushing enterprise operations forward into the future.
“5G and Edge are bringing a new wave of transformation, in the same way as mobile broadband and the cloud did some years ago,” said David del Val, CEO, Telefónica I+D. “By using cloud-native principles we have transformed how the services are delivered to generate turnkey services. Now we can spin up private networks connected to apps on the cloud edge in hours or days, not weeks or months, and abstract most of the underlying operational complexity of current 5G networks. This will enable us to reach more client segments and industries in the coming years.”
A key element of the project is to use automation to shorten time to market and product delivery from weeks to only a few hours, and reduce the cost and complexity barriers for enterprises willing to embrace 5G and Edge computing services. The platform uses CI/CD tolls to automate the integration of the service components, including the core Pente network, and enables the generation of an operational model that automates the testing, deployment and operation of applications on top of the platform. The first customer PoCs will start this year.
This meeting of IoT, 5G, AI, and Edge Computing infrastructures and operations will drive the next wave of IoT and Industry 4.0, and this is one of the first major comprehensive platforms to bring these technologies together in a cohesive product. It’s going to be interesting to watch the use cases come together over the next year.