Sunday, August 13, 2023

Cisco to acquire WG2 for could-native mobile core

Cisco agreed to acquire Working Group Two (WG2), a Norwegian company built from a Telenor incubation together with Cisco, that pioneered a cloud native mobile core as-a-service platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Cisco said WG2’s platform aligns with its Mobility Services Platform.

In a blog post, Matsum Mir, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cisco Networking’s Provider Mobility business, writes: “WG2’s expertise in the mobile space brings capabilities crucial to the enterprise market including complete authentication, provisioning, voice, messaging, and data services, all of which will be rolled into our existing Control Center offers. Together, our Mobility Services Platform, and the Cisco Networking Cloud, Assurance, Security, and Collaboration portfolios, deliver remarkable value to our Service Provider partners and address business critical use cases for our enterprise customers.”

  • In 2019, Working Group Two (WG2), which is a new venture backed by Telenor Group and Digital Alpha (a financial fund supported by Cisco), announced a wholesale cloud-managed mobile network platform that will run both control and user plane on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The WG2 platform includes Cisco’s virtualized Ultra Packet Core, delivering 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile services, hosted on AWS. WG2 said its platform allows mobile operators and enterprises to create and monetize a new breed of business and consumer mobile services that control the network through a simple cloud-based API.