How Customers Can Drive Businesses In The 5G Era

Consumers are eager to experience the much-hyped benefits of 5G, even as telecommunications companies are figuring out how to deploy this new technology and stay profitable. Much attention has been focused on how to ramp up network speed and power on the edge, far from a centralised data centre and closer to the end users who create the data.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) network architecture supports edge-based applications that require high bandwidth and low latency. Because of the MEC platform’s ability to interact with the Radio Access Network (RAN) directly, MEC will relieve bandwidth congestion. This offers better performance for high-bandwidth applications such as augmented reality, local content distribution and pretty much anything that contributes to the quickly growing collection of the Internet of Things. MEC also opens up new markets for developers who are creating the innovative, new applications and services that run on the edge.

All this puts pressure on telecommunications companies to build an edge and cloud-based infrastructure faster. To be successful, communication service providers must figure out how to use this new infrastructure to save money and generate new revenue streams.

Managing and scaling decentralised edge computing is a huge challenge for telecommunication companies. Lenovo is directly addressing this challenge with a single platform and architecture that deploys, automates and manages edge computing solutions from one place. T-Systems, the largest IT services company in Germany, operates 30 data centres around the world, running business-critical applications on 65,000 virtual machines for its large enterprise customers. When it used Lenovo’s Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) solution to reduce the time to provision the entire end-to-end system from weeks to hours, it made a huge difference, and not just for the customers who got their private clouds up and running that much faster.

LOC-A is the end-to-end cloud automation platform to plan, deploy, manage operations and benchmark distributed cloud infrastructure with support for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, OpenStack and VMware Cloud Foundation. The LOC-A solution decreased T-Systems’ operational expenses by 40%. LOC-A combines the advantages of a public cloud-like rapid scalability, flexibility and high speed to service, with the private cloud advantages of data protection and security — the seamless integration that’s needed to leverage the full potential of 5G.

As a cutting-edge provider, T-Systems can rapidly onboard new customers with various environments. LOC Automation software streamlines the process and simplifies operations across different clouds. In fact, a study by Roy Chua at AvidThink found that communication service providers can see:

• A return on investment of $1.36 NPV over three years for every dollar spent
• A reduction of up to 81% time on initial deployment lead times
• A labor reduction for cloud implementation of 11X

Customers can leverage the automated deployment of Red Hat OpenStack, OpenShift, VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes to reduce the time to incremental revenue.

Digital transformation continues to be at the forefront of economic growth and development in the region. According to the latest findings of IDC, governments in the Middle East and Africa spent a total of USD 12.8 billion on information and communication technologies (ICT) in 2019. This figure is set to grow to cross the USD 15 billion mark by 2023. As 5G coverage continues to grow in the wider Middle East region, companies are increasingly looking to update their current IT infrastructure to accommodate 5G technologies.

5G may present the telecommunications industry with new challenges, but it is also bringing new opportunities. Lenovo is well suited to help customers figure out how to thrive in this new era of communications by ensuring network deployment, expansions and maintenance perform reliably.