Telecoms equipment maker Ericsson and chipmaker Intel have agreed a partnership deal to help network operator customers build data centres, putting them on a more competitive footing against big, cloud-based Internet firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
"We will build data centre equipment which will actually have the same performance as many of the big cloud providers are doing for themselves," Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg told a news conference at the Mobile World Congress 2015 telecoms trade show in Barcelona yesterday.
Ericsson said it will help its global base of major telecoms companies to shift to cloud computing using Intel data centre designs to compete more actively with Web rivals.
No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed.
Over the past decade, Web-based services like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have stopped buying finished computers, storage devices and network components, and instead developed their own systems in-house to create massive, low-cost data centres in the cloud to serve billions of users.
Ericsson's partnership with Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, puts it in a crowded market for providing bespoke data centres, where it will also compete with a range of technology suppliers, including Cisco and IBM.
The Swedish company's plan is to focus initially on equipping big telecom operators rather than competing for new corporate customers in other industries, its CEO said.
Telecom operators are rushing to build data centres in the cloud to slash the cost of hardware spending within their networks, improve the range of services they offer subscribers and to obtain the Web-wide reach of the big Internet companies.
"The difference is that we are going to provide it to the market," Vestberg said. "This is predominately to see that we give a competitive-edge for our customers, the carriers."
The move builds on a number of smaller cloud software company acquisitions made by Ericsson over the past year.
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