Börje Ekholm began his tenure as the new president and CEO of Ericsson today. Elkholm served as an Ericsson board member, and previously was CEO of Patricia Industries, which is a division of Investor AB, a Swedish investment company that is Ericsson’s largest shareholder and controls more than 20 percent of its voting rights.

In a statement to employees, Ekholm said he is looking forward to seeing massive transformation across industries as 5G is introduced.

Jan Frykhammer, who served as Ericsson’s temporary CEO for the past six months, will remain on the executive leadership team and will serve as an executive vice president and advisor to Ekholm. Maghus Mandersson will also serve as an executive vice president and advisor to Ekholm. Carl Mellander will remain acting chief financial officer.

Ekholm has several challenges ahead of him. Ericsson has struggled financially over the past year, and in October the company reported its first net loss in four years. The company also is about two years into a cost and efficiency program in which it has to reduce its annual run rate of operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, to $5.94 billion.

One bright spot for Ericsson is its strategic partnership with Cisco. Both companies have claimed that the partnership was a success and have said they have had more than 200 customer engagements.

Another of those engagements has resulted in a deal. Today the companies said that they will be working with Vodafone Hutchison Australia (HVA) to evolve the carrier’s telecom cloud infrastructure. Specifically, VHA will evolve its network core and increase its agility and programmability from network slicing.

The products involved in the deal include Ericsson’s Hyperscale Datacenter System and software components such as the Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud Manager and Cloud software-defined networking (SDN) controller. Meanwhile, Cisco will provide the Cisco WAN Automation Engine, the Network Services Orchestrator, Cisco IP Network VNFs including IOS XR 9000v and Cloud Services Router 1000v, and both virtualized and physical security technologies such as the Adaptive Security Appliance and the Cisco Firepower security gateway.

Ericsson will oversee the deal and handle the integration.

The VHA deal is one of 60 that the companies have won since announcing their partnership in November 2015. Other deals include those with 3 Italy, Vodafone Portugal, Aster Dominican Republic, and Cable & Wireless in the Caribbean.