With the growing adoption of 5G technologies over the past few years, the telecommunications industry has become more competitive than ever. Communication service providers (CSPs) are looking to stay ahead of the curve by modernizing their 5G networks using cloud native, microservices-based architecture, from the core to the far edges. To better serve the growing modernization needs of CSPs, Ericsson and VMware have come together with a certified interoperable offering, Ericsson Charging with VMware Tanzu. Ericsson Charging became the first-ever product to receive the VMware Ready for VMware Tanzu certification, the highest level of endorsement offered by VMware to partners’ products compatible with VMware Tanzu.
Ericsson Charging, which is at the heart of Ericsson’s Business Support System offering, is a modular, scalable, open, single convergent online charging system that uses industry standards and protocols. As an evolution of the industry-leading Ericsson Charging System, Ericsson Charging provides a future-looking, feature-rich platform for CSPs to capture and secure revenue streams and take advantage of business opportunities from traditional telecom services as well as digital services, 5G, and the Internet of Things.
VMware Tanzu products enable enterprises to extract maximum value from modern applications on any platform. The VMware Tanzu portfolio provides the foundation of a modern application platform that drives scale across multi-cloud and Kubernetes operations—with the right levels of connectivity, governance, observability, and automation. Moreover, the VMware Tanzu portfolio enables the entire software supply chain to be more secure while offering a cohesive developer experience to speed up application development and delivery cycles.
Ericsson continues to drive efforts toward modernizing Ericsson Charging and embracing a cloud native, distributed infrastructure. VMware Tanzu perfectly complements Ericsson’s ambitions by providing a trusted, more secure, and scalable platform for modern applications. Through this collaboration and the certified offering, Ericsson and VMware aim to make the containerized version of Ericsson Charging with VMware Tanzu the preferred option for CSPs that are looking for a modern, cloud native solution to address their 5G monetization needs.
The architecture of Ericsson Charging with VMware Tanzu
Ericsson Charging: First to receive VMware Ready for VMware Tanzu certification
As a significant milestone in this collaboration, Ericsson Charging became the first-ever product to successfully complete the VMware Ready certification process that has been specifically created for VMware Tanzu. The VMware Ready certification helps reassure customers that the combined VMware Tanzu and Ericsson Charging solution, when deployed according to the reference architecture, is highly reliable, robust, and scalable. Moreover, it enables the offering to be deployed into production environments in the least possible time.
As a part of the certification, the engineering teams of Ericsson and VMware collaborated to create a joint reference architecture, which was put through a rigorous testing process that covered multiple areas, such as installation, sanity, robustness, performance, upgrade/fallback, and stability.
With the results from these tests, our engineering teams demonstrated that CSP operators could achieve better results and reap several business benefits by running Ericsson Charging with VMware stack rather than with bare metal.
Major benefits of the certified offering
The benefits of Ericsson Charging with VMware Tanzu are spread across multiple parameters, such as hardware optimization, shared resource utilization, time to market, ease of lifecycle management, operation complexity, resiliency, and performance. Some of the major advantages that CSPs gain with this offering, as observed from our testing and certification processes, are summarized below:
Increased serviceability: Our testing indicated as much as 15–20 percent better hardware utilization, resulting in up to 5 million subscribers per server (as compared to the 4 million subscribers per server with bare metal) and up to 22,000 customers per second per server.
Accelerated time to market: Deployment of new Kubernetes clusters can happen as quickly as just a few minutes as compared to the days or weeks typically required, allowing CSPs to enter new markets and serve new customers seamlessly.
Minimal downtime: Failproof automation of the entire lifecycle management and upgrade processes with zero to minimal downtime enable the system to always be up to date, with no security or compliance issues.
Ericsson Charging on VMware Marketplace
VMware Marketplace is the one-stop shop for VMware-validated and -certified ecosystem solutions that enables customers to discover, try, purchase, and deploy directly to VMware endpoints. To learn more about the VMware Ready for VMware Tanzu certified Ericsson Charging solution, visit the solution page on VMware Marketplace.
The listing for Ericsson Charging in VMware Marketplace
Learn more
Looking to learn more about Ericsson’s next-generation Kubernetes platform running on VMware Tanzu? There is no better resource than the on-demand video of our recent VMware Explore session, Building a Modern Kubernetes Platform on VMware Tanzu for 5G: Charging Apps with Ericsson, featuring an expert speaker panel with Hugo Phan (Senior Staff Architect, VMware), Trilokesh Visoriya (Senior Solution Architect, Ericsson), and Gabriella Ahlbom (Global Partner Manager, Ericsson).
You can also refer to a recent blog published by Ericsson, covering the collaboration between Ericsson, VMware, and Dell Technologies in creating a certified platform to underpin the Ericsson Digital Business Support System portfolio.
