Ericsson and Spirent Communications are the latest ones to join the 5G Open Innovation Lab as corporate partners while Accenture and Avanade joined as founding partners.
The 5G Open Innovation Lab, or 5GOILab for short, continues to be led by its founding and corporate partners, which include Amdocs, Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Motorola, T-Mobile and VMware.
According to Jim Brisimitzis, general partner of the Seattle-based 5G Open Innovation Lab, it’s important to expand the Lab’s capabilities over the next few years as it grows its current ecosystem of 47 startups.
“Building on the experience and expertise of our already stellar partners, our new founding partners Accenture and Avanade and corporate partners Ericsson and Spirent will enable us to fast-track these solutions serving diverse industries such as manufacturing and logistics, agriculture and connected cars,” he said in a statement.
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As with any group, each new member has its own role to play. Ericsson and the 5G Open Innovation Lab will collaborate through the Ericsson Global Innovation Labs and Ericsson’s own innovation programs, which include Ericsson’s D-15 Labs in Santa Clara, California. The companies will work on proof-of-concept projects, community events, mentorship programs and other activities.
In the near future, plans call for Ericsson and the Lab to collaborate on 5G-enabled services targeting ways to streamline and improve manufacturing operations, energy production and utilities' safety and performance where the introduction of artificial intelligence and IoT can prove useful.
Spirent expects to provide strategic counsel and solutions for automated assurance and for testing 5G and edge solutions to speed deployment.
Accenture’s role will be to focus on accelerating monetization opportunities of 5G use cases and solutions globally across various industries. It also will provide business and technology assets, as well as resources to help the Lab develop capabilities that are interoperable with existing platforms and anything new that comes down the pike.
Advanade will help advance edge compute solutions with Microsoft and the Lab’s ecosystem partners, providing oversight and direction to the 5G field labs to find potential network and edge compute scenarios for pilots and provisioning.