News Release
Elisa, Elisa Polystar, and Wind River Achieve New Automation Milestone for Telco Edge Data Centers

HELSINKI & ALAMEDA, CA — Feb. 22, 2024 — Elisa Oyj, a leading telecommunications company; Elisa Polystar, a pioneer in autonomous networks; and Wind River®, a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems, have reached a new milestone and achieved the fully automated deployment of cloud infrastructure, cloud-native network functions, and end-to-end monitoring for telco edge data center sites using Wind River® Studio Conductor and the Elisa Polystar Customer Experience Assurance solution.

This significant milestone empowers service providers to further expand their distributed edge deployments to a large scale with economic efficiency and superior network performance. Studio Conductor delivers a single pane of glass to manage and automate deployment in large-scale distributed cloud environments. Elisa Polystar Customer Experience Assurance brings advanced end-to-end visibility, network tracing, and troubleshooting capabilities for a first-class customer experience.

The companies have worked together to show that their jointly developed technology, while utilizing the Studio Conductor automation framework, can significantly reduce deployment time of the entire end-to-end service and operator intervention time. For instance, through an automated process, the time needed for auditing the configuration of the underlying hardware can be reduced by 80%, with human interaction time reduced by 90%. These figures improve as the number of servers grows. Likewise, savings of up to 70–90% can be achieved by automating the network function onboarding process. These represent the real improvements possible when embracing high levels of automation in network operations.

“Elisa is driving state-of-the-art automation of our operations and edge deployments. After successfully automating edge cloud platform deployments, we are now focusing on automating lifecycle management of applications deployed at edge. It is thrilling to achieve new milestones as we grow our collaboration with Wind River to automatically deploy network function workloads on our regional edge cloud data centers,” said Markus Kinnunen, vice president, Cloud Services, Elisa. “By working with Wind River, Elisa can deliver on advanced automation to shrink time to deploy and enhance network quality.”

“Elisa Polystar enables CSPs to achieve self-driving networks. Through the collaboration with Elisa and Wind River, we have demonstrated how our Customer Experience Assurance solution can be seamlessly integrated with automatic lifecycle management of network functions in edge cloud infrastructure,” said Thomas Nilsson, chief product officer at Elisa Polystar. “Our customers can trust that Elisa Polystar AI-powered Data Operations, Automated Assurance, and Automated Operations solutions are ready for dynamic edge networks, continuing to support CSPs in their strategic decision-making and to drive customer experience and automation use cases for operational efficiency.”

“Elisa and Elisa Polystar are industry innovators in automation and digital services. With each new advancement, we look forward to growing our collaboration,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River. “Wind River Studio enables industry-unique, distributed, and edge-aware automation to ease infrastructure management, application deployment, and public cloud integration. Together with Elisa, we continue to help service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low-latency cloud-native infrastructure.”

These latest achievements showcase the companies’ commitment to innovation and their setting of a new benchmark in operational excellence. This technology will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2024 at the companies’ respective booths: Wind River (Hall 2, 2F25) and Elisa and Elisa Polystar (Hall 5, booth 5F35).

Elisa was the first to launch a fully automated edge data center into commercial service in Europe. In addition to Studio Conductor, the data center leverages Wind River Studio Cloud Platform, Wind River Studio Analytics, and the 5G core User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s packet core vendor. Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. Elisa’s UPF application enables local breakout to regional services, including enterprises that need fast, secure, and low-latency access to their own local data centers. With Studio Conductor, the deployment process becomes fully automated, enabling rapid and efficient provisioning of edge data center resources.

For more information about Wind River work in telecommunications, visit www.windriver.com/solutions/telecommunications.

About Elisa

Elisa’s mission is a sustainable future through digitalization. We are a pioneer in telecommunications and digital services and in 5G. We provide sustainable solutions for over 2.8 million consumers, corporate and public administration customers in our core markets of Finland and Estonia, as well as in more than 100 countries internationally. In Finland, Elisa is a market leader in telecommunications, and our international cooperation partners include Vodafone and Tele2. Elisa is listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki. In 2023, our revenue was EUR 2.2 billion and we employed 5,700 people in more than 20 countries. Elisa is rated as one of the most sustainable companies in the world. Visit elisa.com.

About Elisa Polystar

Elisa Polystar is a leading global provider of cloud-native AI-driven solutions, empowering communication service providers (CSPs) in their journey toward self-driving networks. With a proven portfolio spanning data management, network analytics, and automation, we transform CSP networks, ensuring exceptional customer experiences and operational excellence. Our innovative AI-driven analytics have consistently reduced OpEx and CapEx for 100+ CSPs worldwide, fostering closed-loop network operations and automation across RAN, transport, and core domains. As a vendor-agnostic telco expert, we seamlessly integrate with various hardware platforms and technologies, leveraging our unique advantage of testing innovations in Elisa’s live network. Elisa Polystar is part of the Elisa Group, a pioneer in telecommunications, hyper-automation, and digital services, serving over 5 million customers in Finland and Estonia. Elisa Polystar is certified to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2013 by an accredited certification body. For more information, please visit www.elisapolystar.com.

About Wind River

Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems. For more than four decades, the company has been an innovator and pioneer, powering billions of devices and systems that require the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability. Wind River software and expertise are accelerating digital transformation across industries, including automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and telecommunications. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio supported by world-class global professional services and support and a broad partner ecosystem. To learn more, visit Wind River at www.windriver.com.

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