MWC: Ericsson, Akamai partner for mobile cloud acceleration

BARCELONA – Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) is tapping into Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM) expansive content delivery networks (CDNs) to create a mobile cloud acceleration platform that will push e-commerce, enterprise and Internet content to the edge of the wireless network and thus closer to the end user.

Akamai’s global network caches content and applications from some 130,000 Web domains, but Akamai’s extensive reach has been limited to wireline networks, Akamai President David Kenny said at an Ericsson press event on the first day of Mobile World Congress. “When we get to cellular networks we don’t have the same influence today,” Kenny said.

But the exclusive deal would set up content delivery networks touching operator networks across the world, allowing operators, Web brands and enterprises to get their content and applications to customers faster and more efficiently and open the door for new business models that provide better quality of experience for a premium price, said Ericsson CEO and President Hans Vestberg.

Ericsson has technically been in cloud services for quite some time, cloud being another way of describing the sizable menu of hosted services and applications it’s offered for years. Ericsson hosts SMS and MMS for dozens of operators, hosts carrier application stores and provides cloud-based billing as a managed service. But Vestberg hinted that there is a subtle shift in how Ericsson is approaching the cloud. Rather than provide a dedicated hosted service itself, Ericsson is developing cloud networks for use by its customers and partners like Akamai, becoming an enabler rather than a vertically integrated supplier of cloud services. Ericsson’s expertise, Vestberg said, increasingly lies in its ability to build the clouds themselves and then connect them.

Though CDNs have primarily focused on caching content on wireline broadband networks, Vestberg their true potential will be unlocked on wireless broadband networks. Ericsson projects there will be 1 billion personal mobile broadband connections at the end of 2011 and 5 billion in 2016, far exceeding the number of PCs and fixed connections.
Kenny added that cloud services are just beginning to make their impact on the data world. He compared the development of the cloud today to the development of the Internet in 1995. “There’s going to be a lot of innovation from customers we already have and customers we’re going to get together,” Kenny said.

Ericsson made the cloud a key focus of its first day of the Congress, having announced ahead of the show a new converged IP networking strategy and enhancements to its radio line. In addition to the Akamai partnership, Ericsson announced a new PC-as-a-service platform with Novatum that moves all the operating system, software and processing capabilities of a PC into the cloud and a basic hardware client to connect to that cloud over a mobile connection.
Ericsson also unveiled a machine-to-machine cloud in parallel with its CDN cloud. Called Device Connection Platform, the software-as-a-service solution creates a virtualized M2M management network, which can scale to handle millions of device connections.