Ericsson.
Building a cutting-edge cloud-native blockchain solution and transforming product delivery.
- 15+ continuous delivery pipelines enabling
- 20+ deployments per day
- 50x faster regional expansion and new customers onboarding
Project Summary.
The client.
Ericsson is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company.
As one of the leading providers of information and communication technology to service providers, Ericsson enables connectivity through game-changing technology and services that are easy to use, adopt and scale.
Project background.
As part of its innovative customer-facing portfolio and to improve its network rollout process, Ericsson has developed a blockchain-based solution known as Ericsson Customer Acceptance (ECA).
ECA is designed to help improve, track and orchestrate the acceptance approval process by adding immutability and security to the data layer and end-to-end traceability.
Challenges.
The innovative ECA solution was owned by Ericsson’s blockchain unit, initially developed by Ericsson’s in-house team alongside a specialist blockchain technology and services provider.
- Time Pressures
- Deployment Model
- Cloud Challenges
We were at the cutting-edge of a new blockchain cloud deployment. But this led to battling with cloud infrastructure and security issues.
Our security procedures were not fitting well with our development efforts, so new deployments were time-consuming. This was really slowing everything down.
Nordcloud helped us to make the project more agile and faster in execution.
Our Approach.
Having enjoyed a strong relationship with Ericsson as a cloud-native services provider for over five years, Nordcloud was trusted as the go-to cloud partner to solve these challenges.
The Nordcloud team were tasked with developing the blockchain solution in a truly cloud-native way – focusing on the technology behind the product, plus the tooling and processes around it.
Priorities.
With ECA being an innovative application developed in a completely greenfield environment, Nordcloud came in while the solution was still in its development phase and product delivery strategies were still being explored.
Therefore, the key requirements for a successful implementation of ECA were:
Security
Processes and tooling to meet security and local data sovereignty requirements.
Speed of delivery
Automate deployments for consistency and to maximise delivery speed, while decreasing risk of application or system failure.
Multi-tenancy
Enable multiple customers to be part of the same blockchain network while strictly adhering to security and data regulations
Global scalability
Global scalability of both the cloud infrastructure and the blockchain platform and the ability to deploy in any supported Azure region.
Solutions.
The Nordcloud experts formed a strong collaborative team with Ericsson and the blockchain provider’s engineers. The team focused on the Azure infrastructure, blockchain platform, security elements and automation development. This included introducing DevOps principles and agile methodologies, allowing for rapid development and release of new features.
Blockchain Solution Design
The Nordcloud experts formed a strong collaborative team with Ericsson and the blockchain provider’s engineers. The team focused on the Azure infrastructure, blockchain platform, security elements and automation development. This included introducing DevOps principles and agile methodologies, allowing for rapid development and release of new features.
- Cloud architecture
- Security
- Global expansion
Adopting Automation
Introducing automation was a major win not only in the success of this project, but in enabling Ericsson’s future cloud deliveries. This would maximise delivery speed, decrease risk of system failure and enable agile, on-demand delivery.
- Modular Code Base
- GitOps Practices
- DevSecOps Adoption
Results.
The Nordcloud team contributed to developing the blockchain-based ECA solution, designing and implementing the cloud architecture including infrastructure, security and automation.
The team also introduced adaptability in architecture and technology. This is valuable when developing a greenfield solution such as this, when new challenges arise and more suitable solutions may need to be considered. A truly cloud-native approach provides the agility to adopt to newly emerging technologies.
Blockchain solution
Successfully developed a cloud-native foundation empowering ECA as a blockchain solution
DevOps & GitOps adoption
15+ continuous delivery pipelines enabling
20+ deployments per day
Speed of releases
50x faster regional expansion and new customers onboarding
Transformed delivery
Challenged previous methods and established lean ways of working, increasing speed to market, and driving transformation beyond the program
The Nordcloud team is very supportive in engaging the wider business. At every level, they are professional, transparent, and extremely competent. This helps build trust, which contributed real value throughout the project.
Combined with the commitment and energy they brought to the delivery, we continued pushing the ambition of the project and went beyond what we thought possible.
This of course meant we built a strong solution, but also changed the way we work with partners.
Next Steps.
Built on a strong technical foundation with global reach, Ericsson now plans to accelerate adoption. And the blockchain unit will continue to leverage the knowledge acquired and the ECA cloud foundation to pursue new business opportunities based on blockchain.
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