Vodafone cut costs 50% with VMware telco cloud

Vodafone rolled out VMware’s network virtualization infrastructure across all of its 21 European business markets in a move that the operator says reduced the cost of its core network functions by 50%.

With the completion of its work in Albania, Vodafone deployed VMware’s telco cloud infrastructure across more than 57 sites in Europe and 25 in its Africa, Asia, and Oceania markets. It supports voice core, data core, and service platforms on more than 900 virtual network functions (VNFs). According to the operators, VMware’s infrastructure allows it to build, test, and deploy functions more securely and 40% faster.

Almost 50% of Vodafone’s core network nodes provide voice and data services running on VMware’s NVI platform, vCloud NFV.

Vodafone started using VMware’s NFV platform in 2017. At the time, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger called it “our largest-ever telco deal.”

More recently, at MWC Barcelona 2019, Gelsinger touted the operator as one of its top customers and Vodafone said VMware is its primary strategic partner for telco cloud infrastructure services. That meant, at the time, that VMware’s products and services were live in 15 countries, in more than 50 Vodafone sites, and carrying subscriber traffic on more than 300 core network functions.

Since then, VMware has added several other tier-one operators to its customer fold including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and NTT DoCoMo.

Shekar Ayyar, EVP and GM of telco and edge cloud at VMware, previously told SDxCentral that more than 70 service providers use VMware on “the network side for some form of NFV” and that more than 90% of carriers were using VMware technology in their IT data centers.

―SDX Central