Telekom Romania Mobile Communications is moving many of its services to the cloud – just as its main shareholder, Telekom Romania, is about to be sold to Orange.
The company said it had chosen Mavenir to deliver cloud-native services to customers.
Jovan Cetkovic, director of governance and transformation at Telekom Romania, said: “Through this partnership, we continue our journey to a modern, agile digital company, ready to deliver all the smart digital solutions needed by customers in their lives and businesses.”
The deal comes just three weeks after the European Commission approved the acquisition of Telekom Romania (pictured) by Orange for a reported €268 million.
The Commission said the approval is conditional on the divestiture of Telekom Romania’s 30% minority shareholding in Telekom Romania Mobile Communications, which is a direct competitor of Orange and is one of the four mobile operators in the country.
Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president of the Commission in charge of competition policy, said about the deal: “Europeans need access to fast and reliable communication services, with sufficient alternatives on the market. With this decision, and the commitments offered by Orange, the Romanian telecommunications market will continue to offer high quality communication services at competitive prices.”
Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Orange’s deputy CEO in charge of Europe outside France, commented when the deal was announced last year: “This acquisition is an important step to accelerate our convergence strategy in Europe. Romania is a key market for Orange and a great success story.” The Orange deal is likely to leave Telekom Romania Mobile Communications effectively in the control of Deutsche Telekom, via its Greek offshoot, OTE.
The mobile division, Telekom Romania Mobile Communications, which is to be separated out, said the services to be offered in cloud form would be IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) plus voice over LTE and voice over Wifi (VoLTE and VoWi-Fi). The move to virtualised IMS will facilitate the operator’s network transition to 4G LTE and 5G, said Mavenir.
The vendor said this morning that, “in combination with Mavenir’s cloud-native IMS platform, VoLTE and VoWi-Fi microservices will provide continuity of voice services for Telekom Romania while helping the company to strengthen its 4G/LTE network and facilitate the transition to 5G”.
Cetkovic said: “Through this partnership, we continue our journey to a modern, agile digital company, ready to deliver all the smart digital solutions needed by customers in their lives and businesses. IMS will give us greater flexibility and strengthen our competitive position while Mavenir’s VoLTE and VoWi-Fi applications will enhance our core voice offering as we continue to migrate to 4G and 5G.”
Mavenir said its network software solutions are running on Deutsche Telekom’s pan-European cross-border Pan-Net telco cloud network which will significantly reduce operational expenditure and has permitted faster time-to-market.