This week at Mobile World Congress 2023, SoftBank Corp.—a leading telecommunications operator in Japan—and VMware are highlighting how the two companies are working together to help SoftBank reach their objectives to help them boost efficiencies, enhance automation and ultimately gain a competitive edge.
SoftBank’s most recent project was providing its customers with a private 5G service that could be managed and monitored in the same way as a public 5G core network. To accelerate progress on the company’s strategy, SoftBank expanded its offerings on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform by building and operating a horizontal infrastructure for 5G core.
In building on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform and VMware Tanzu™ Kubernetes Grid, and working closely with VMware’s Professional Services, SoftBank was able to address their biggest goals in building a common infrastructure to bring their 5G core to the edge:
- Deploy a unified architecture that provides solutions to customers in any industry. In its original infrastructure, to deliver telecommunications hardware and software to customers based on their individual needs, SoftBank required the deployment of multiple engineers who specialized in specific industries—resulting in longer delivery times and the allocation of a significant amount of resources. To address this issue, SoftBank used the VMware Telco Cloud Platform to create a horizontal, common infrastructure which allowed for a unified architecture and the ability to focus engineer resources on increasing efficiency.
- Automation. SoftBank’s most critical need was speed. Building their unified infrastructure on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform allowed for the introduction of automation, which dramatically accelerated the time-to-market of their innovations and allowed new services to be developed, thus providing a competitive advantage.
With the deployment of a horizontal infrastructure for 5G, SoftBank’s customers operating in public clouds can now easily divert their applications to private 5G environments. This has resulted in more secure networks, allowing for more complex services like payments and the collection of private information.
Going forward, SoftBank will work with VMware to create solutions for customers across various industries, expand their communication and cloud infrastructure, and invigorate Japan to embrace a 5G future.
For more information on how SoftBank and VMware are working together, please go here.
