Ericsson recently wrapped up its inaugural Imagine Possible event that it hopes will help expand its position from being one of the world’s largest 5G telecommunications vendors to being more deeply engaged with the developer community to expand opportunities in increasingly software-focused 5G environments.

Niklas Heuveldop, President and CEO of Ericsson North America, headlined the Silicon Valley event and noted the vendor’s efforts are tied to its recently completed acquisition of Vonage Holdings. That $6.2 billion deal was questioned by many, but Heuveldop said is integral for Ericsson to approach the developer community.

“In an ideal world we would not have had to buy Vonage for $6.2 billion to unlock some of the hang up in the system,” Heuveldop explained in an interview with SDxCentral from the event. “The reality, however, is that when I talk to our partners, they get phone calls, and they talk to their developers, and they're just wondering and scratching their head about what's all this excitement about 5G? I don't get it. Then they come to us and say, what's all this excitement about 5G? What do I tell my developers? And then we look at each other and say, well, that's strange because you have latency, you have network slicing, you have all these amazing capabilities. What part of that do developers not understand?”

Heuveldop said the Vonage deal has unlocked access to “millions of developers and 120,000-plus enterprise customers northbound, and southbound we have all the networking expertise we need.” This allows Ericsson to now accelerate the development process through this entire Ericsson-controlled stack to drive innovation and understanding.

“Vonage understands the language developers speak and how API's need to be packaged and tailored toward the gamer community and manufacturing community with the proper SDK wrapped around it,” Heuveldop said.

This API model also allows Ericsson to open up that development to other vendors and organizations that want to tap into this ecosystem.

“There is enough business out there for everybody,” he added. “Now's not the time to be selfish because then we're going to bring the entire system to a standstill. I think there is enough opportunity for us in the industry transformation and public sector transformation to just look at the bigger opportunity and how we all can contribute to it.”

Ericsson’s management during the vendor’s most recent earnings release reiterated the importance Vonage and its previous Cradlepoint acquisition are playing in expanding Ericsson’s enterprise market opportunity.

“We expect the Vonage acquisition to be highly accretive, and it complements our enterprise wireless solution offerings with Cradlepoint and dedicated networks,” CEO Börje Ekholm said. “Overall, we expect our enterprise offering to have a growth potential north of 20% per year.”

The next challenge is then to get those developers in tune with what Ericsson 5G network technology can bring to the table and what new innovations it can power. The industry often throws around buzz words like low latency, network slicing, and edge computing, but those are typically outside of a developer’s normal word set.

Heuveldop noted that while network performance matters, “we need to remove the complexity for developers to build great applications as they try to take advantage of those network capabilities.”

“They look at SDKs, APIs, drag-and-drop building applications,” Heuveldop said. “They should not really have to worry about what is 5G standalone, what is 5G [non-standalone], all these acronyms that we throw around. … But, how do we expose those capabilities to developers in an open, intuitive, and programmable way that they can continue building great applications?”

That question is easier to ask to answer, but that is what Ericsson is attempting to do. This includes work with competitors, hyperscale partners, and its customers to bridge that gap to more fully expand its 5G portfolio.

“I think we would all agree that this is really going to take off in a big way,” he added.