Nokia and Ericsson haven't capitalized on telecom equipment peer Huawei's problems with government perceptions of its security status, according to Wall Street Journal sources at major European wireless providers.
The sources say the companies have been slow to release advanced equipment to match Huawei. Both companies denied those claims, says the WSJ. Other sources say Nokia and Ericsson worry about potential China retaliation if they are seen taking advantage of Huawei's situation.
For the first three quarters of last year, Huawei held 28% of the global telecom equipment market compared to 17% for Nokia and 13.4% for Ericsson, according to Dell'Oro Group data. The market has tended to be based on the proprietary standards set by the vendors but this is changing slowly.
The evolution of telecom networks has led to heterogeneous environments where proprietary systems must coexist with new (open source) cloud technologies. Naturally, there is increased network complexity dispersed among network elements and telco systems. Open source is certainly encroaching into telecoms, but in the short and medium term, channel players should be ready to face a scenario where vendors’ proprietary technology is still key to their operations.
Cisco and its channels could be beneficiaries, but the business has been concentrating on its SD-WAN portfolio powered by Viptela and Meraki, and Edge computing with options for customers with two new Integrated Services Routers (ISR) designed for small and large branch offices.
Going forward, there are two possible options to shape orchestration architectures, says researcher ABI. One, institute a universal and unified architecture that supplants the current single-layer model with logic that considers orchestration holistically rather than piecemeal. The second option, and the most likely scenario, it says, is to implement automation at each layer of the telco ecosystem and fully integrate from top to bottom, exposing both legacy and digital assets as Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
