Ericsson has won a contract in its own back yard after TeliaSonera picked the equipment manufacturer to manage its field operation services in parts of Sweden.
The vendor said that the five-year agreement extends its managed services footprint for fixed and mobile networks into eight new regions in the Nordics and represents the renewal and expansion of a contract originally signed with TeliaSonera in 2010. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Under the terms of the contract, Ericsson will provide field services for fixed and mobile network including installation, repair and delivery of new and existing customer connections, both in the passive and active network.
"Increased network complexity and performance expectations puts high demands on the operators to run their operations in a cost-efficient manner while providing world-class experience to their customers. Ericsson has invested more than $1 billion in tools, methods and processes in order to help its customers increase network efficiency," said Charlotta Sund, president of the Northern Europe and Central Asia region at Ericsson.
Ericsson has been managing field operation activities for TeliaSonera since 2003, and clearly is an obvious choice as the operator's vendor partner particularly for managed network services of this kind. However, events in recent years have indicated that vendors cannot afford to be complacent even about their domestic markets: the Sweden-based vendor lost out to Huawei in late 2013 when the Chinese equipment vendor landed a major deal in Denmark, ousting Ericsson to become the sole mobile network technology and service provider for TDC. Ericsson had previously been managing TDC's network since 2008.
Managed services are a core business area for Ericsson, and not only in the telecoms market: in May last year the company completed the acquisition of UK-based TV specialist Red Bee Media and said it was now ready to bring telecoms-style managed services to the broadcast industry.
Then in October, the company acquired network software company Sentilla to enhance its ability to help service providers offer managed services to IT organisations covering mobile and cloud technologies.
In July 2014, ABI Research said Ericsson and Huawei each held around 30 per cent of the $13 billion (€11.2 billion) telecom network managed services market. Nokia's networks unit was not far behind with 25 per cent of the market.
For more:
- see this Ericsson release
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