A new Competitive Assessment by global technology intelligence firm ABI Research provides an in-depth and objective evaluation of the telco cloud platforms offered by eleven 5G Telco Cloud-Native Platform players. 5G is slated to enable new business applications and a faster time to market to deploy services for Communication Service Providers (CSPs). Underpinning this would be cloud-native platforms that will make use of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, service meshes, Kubernetes-based container technology, and other cloud-native tools to host new applications including Containerized Network Functions (CNFs) and the new 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) Core. Platform providers in this market are diverse and include incumbent Network Equipment Vendors (NEVs) who have traditionally sold end-to-end network infrastructure solutions with their platforms included in the software stack, as well as cloud computing platform providers who have recently entered the telecom space through the introduction of LTE and 5G networks. While incumbent NEVs make up a majority of the market share in providing telco cloud platforms which host their network functions, cloud computing platform providers are gaining in popularity among CSPs as
telecom networks become more digitized, cloud native, and open.
The companies are evaluated in the following order of ranking:
Market Leaders: VMware, Red Hat
Mainstream: Nokia, ZTE, Canonical, Huawei, Google, Ericsson, Wind River
Followers: AWS, Microsoft Azure
“CSPs are looking to enable cloud-native 5G capabilities through the deployment of a horizontal platform that can span their entire network from the core to RAN to edge. Some of the key criteria that CSPs are looking for include the ability to build a multi-vendor network and avoid vendor lock-in. As the 5G SBA value proposition revolves around providing services on-demand through microservices and cloud-native principles, flexibility, agility, and scalability become major factors CSPs look out for when choosing a platform,” says Kangrui Ling, Industry Analyst at ABI Research.
About ABI Research ABI Research is a global technology intelligence firm delivering actionable research and strategic guidance to technology leaders, innovators, and decision makers around the world