HITS

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inks Deals with Tata Communications, AT&T

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) used the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona to announce a pair of partnerships, one with Tata Communications for cellular IoT connectivity services, another with AT&T for cloud-based subscriber data management.

For Tate Communications, HPE will work to help get India’s first LoRaWAN- (LoRa) based network off the ground. Low Power Wide Area Network supports low-cost mobile and secure bi-directional communication for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and Tata’s network — announced last year — has already seen successful field trials in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalor. When completed, the network will have a reach of more than 400 million people.

HPE will help Tata enable connectivity for enterprise customer solutions throughout India, with connected devices, applications and other IoT solutions for smart buildings, utilities, fleet management, security and more.

“Tata Communications has 15 years of experience in delivering impactful and innovative communications solutions to its customers globally,” said Anthony Bartolo, president of mobility, IoT and collaboration services for Tata Communications. “As part of our commitment to innovation and in driving digital transformation globally, we are creating a cohesive, resilient and highly secure network to deploy IoT applications in India. We are excited to be partnering with HPE in this project as this platform is critical to amalgamating all the complex variables in enabling a truly digital India.”

Tata is tapping HPE’s Universal IoT Platform, which offers support for long-range, low-power connectivity deployments.

“The sheer size of this project is incredible, bringing new services to millions of people,” said David Sliter, VP and GM of HPE’s Communications Solutions Business. “Through our partner centric approach, the HPE Universal IoT platform will enable Tata Communications to build multiple vertical use cases for its Indian IoT network on a common platform with a common data model.”

For AT&T, the telecommunications giant is using HPE to shift its core network functions from physical hardware to a virtualized cloud environment, with the goal of offering more efficient targeted services.

“AT&T’s transformation from physical hardware to HPE’s cloud-based [subscriber data management] solution will provide a highly scalable, reliable and flexible standards-based architecture that supports a diverse and evolving services ecosystem to help make hybrid IT simple,” Sliter said.

SDM allows communications service providers (CSPs) the ability to consolidate and manage subscriber and device data using a single, unified repository, helping the creation of new personalized services. Part of the agreement has ATT&T using HPE’s HPE I-HSS SDM component, which “serves as an integrated home location register (HLR), home subscriber services (HSS) and authentication, authorization and access (AAA) databases, supporting a frontend/backend architecture,” the company said.

“HPE’s I-HSS is an important component in AT&T’s plan to virtualize and migrate our network functions to software running on AT&T’s Integrated Cloud (AIC), using cost effective, standardized equipment,” said Paul Greendyk, VP of mobile core and network services for AT&T.