Ericsson introduces partners to NetCloud AI evolution with ANA

Ericsson’s latest generative AI-based NetCloud Assistant (ANA) has local channel partners like OneStep Group “confident” that it will provide deeper insights and improve operational efficiency for their customers.

The next generation version of ANA was launched in January this year and is a “virtual expert” designed to simplify enterprise 5G network administration, the vendor said. 

Unlike traditional chatbots, which leverage search to provide links to existing resources, ANA has the “ability to read, understand, and generate new text and graphical content”. 

It also provides personalised responses by correlating information from multiple technical documents and unique insights from the customer’s network, transforming hours or even days of work into seconds. 

These products are on private cloud and that provides a security through Ericsson Net Cloud Exchange offering and Net Cloud SASE offering, which provides at the transport layer a level of security for its customers, said Ericsson senior vice president solutions engineering, enterprise wireless solutions Lisa Guess during a visit to Australia for the Ericsson Partner Exchange event in March.

She told ARN, ANA uses generative AI to analyse network conditions, assist with planning, design, failover strategies, and provide predictive maintenance recommendations.

Its currently available to all customers and devices, without additional need for upgrade as it comes with the NetCloud Manager solution.

“We have been working on this for a few years,” Guess said. “This year is foundational because we’re working closely with customers and partners to refine its capabilities and use it to improve sales cycles, customer support, and overall network management.”

Guess explained partners wanted to know how it can help their support organisation to do troubleshooting, planning and network design effectively.

“A few of them are quite intrigued about how can their AI planning that they’re doing for their organisations interact with ANA in even a fun way, not just looking at the output of ANA, but could some of their AI planning co-locate with the planning that we’re doing with ANA,” she said.

ANA for the partners

Ericsson vice president of partner sales Asia Pacific enterprise wireless solutions, John Boladian, told ARN the vendor has a significant number of engineers at Ericsson that are building AI models and large language models within its “own four walls”.

“We’re not going out into the internet and putting information out into the public space,” he said. “All of the tools that we’re creating and included are leveraging all of those technologies and the number of people that we’ve deployed within the company to go and develop it.”

This is the “trust” piece that “customers” have in Ericsson to develop that. Which is why it was important for the vendor to be able to deploy to go and develop that technology for itself first.

“I think AI takes that to the next level, because we have a significant number of partners in the reseller space that see themselves as managed service providers,” he said. “They see that they are managing networks on behalf of their customers, and they’re all running organisations, sometimes in a very lean fashion.

“Anything that we can do that gives them the ability to automatically generate reports, automatically trigger actions that can happen as a result of something [is important].”

The vendor’s partners also have access to the Ericsson Wireless University which comprises of a range of training modules to help them and customers.

“We’ll continue to integrate, you know, how we use these tools into the training,” he said. “I believe we already have an AI module, either developed or being developed, to be able to help them best utilise, AI tools that were built into the product.”

The vendor’s Mountaineer Program also allows partners to take training that can build the needed technical competence.

Partner view on API

OneStep Group is an example of an Ericsson partner that using its API to help stay ahead of the curve with their customers.

Its general manager innovation and product delivery Leuk Andersen told ARN that the MSP was part of Ericsson’s Mountaineer Program.

While Andersen had yet to see the latest version of ANA, as an MSP its priorities were to implement solutions for customers and “then feed it and water and look after it through its life cycle”

“We have gone and done the extra work to integrate through the APIs of NetCloud and start to pull extra information out,” he said. “[This] has helped us to get quicker insights into sort of the performance of our Ericsson wireless networks [customers], and that’s been good.”

According to Andersen AI is machine learning “with a different focus and some new technologies built into it”.

“It’s not new in that regard, but the expectation is, if you’re accumulating that data, what are you doing [with it] and how much extra operational capability will bring to the table.

For Andersen the maturity of Ericsson’s private 5G product was also of interest to MSPs like OneStep Group.

“It’s something I looked at, a couple of years ago, although it was only available in niche areas in the Australian market,” he said. “I think that’s come a long way [and] [is] an interesting technology.”

Andersen explained that the technology has improved, you know, in conjunction with antennas and different things.

“I also think the potential for computing at the edge is also looking at pretty carefully as well. Again, ahead of the curve,” he said. “I’m encouraged by Ericsson’s investments and certainly where they’re going with that.”

As an MSP there’s a never-ending journey of “1 per cent improvement every month, every quarter”; never having the opportunity to think about the ways that they can “take some that sort of leakage out of the chain” of how service is provided, noted Andersen.

“For us, it’s been implementing more mature ITSM [IT service management] tools…certainly using data we get from NetCloud, and bringing that together,” he said. “That’s a big part of what we would tend to do.

“We built all of these dashboards originally and gave them to customers just to show them the information made available and give them ideas; that’s where things like lifestyle management came out of it.”

For OneStep Group there’s no real understanding of the customer’s requirement at a granular level, until they are shown data.

“Then before you know it, you’ve got some new ideas coming out of the mix,” he said.  “For example, if you’re doing something that’s costing you, I don’t know, 90 seconds, 100 times a month, and you can take 30 seconds out of that, or even 10 seconds out of that cycle time…it makes a big difference.

“I’ve tended to find over the years that service efficiency tends to equate to an improved user experience.”