Ericsson named long-time company veteran Erik Ekudden to Group CTO and Head of Technology and Architecture starting July 1. Ekudden has been with Ericsson since 1993 and most recently was based in Silicon Valley where he was responsible for the company’s technology strategies.

“My mission will be to define the technology direction of Ericsson and to work closely with customers to design and operate those technologies in the most effective and efficient way,” Ekudden said, adding that the company will do that with a particular focus on the distributed cloud and mobile.

Ekudden replaces former Group CTO Ulf Ewaldsson, who is now the head of the company’s Digital Services Business. Ewaldsson was moved into that role as part of a management team restructuring announced in late March.

Ericsson’s new CEO Borje Ekholm has been retooling the management team since he became CEO in January. In March he eliminated four members of the management team and restructured the company into three business units: Networks, Digital Services, and Managed Services.

Also, earlier this month Ericsson announced the departure of Rima Qureshi the head of Ericsson North America and a key player in the company’s partnership with Cisco.

Like many traditional infrastructure vendors, Ericsson has been working hard to transition to a more software-driven networking environment that its operator customers are beginning to embrace. As part of that, the company today launched a new Support Services program that incorporates predictive analytics and deep learning and helps with network-level fault isolation and recovery.

As an example, Ericsson said that with new use cases being developed like video on demand, self-driving vehicles, and factory automation, companies will need to rely on networks that have low latencies (under 10 milliseconds). To maintain that type of low latency, operators will have to rely on automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. And, perhaps more importantly, they will have to support both virtual networks and hybrid networks at the same time, which can be complex and problematic.

Ericsson said its Support Services can help operators reduce the number of network incidents and minimize network recovery time. In fact, in trials and early deployments, Ericsson said it has helped operators handle software changes and reduce network recovery time from four hours to just 60 minutes. Plus, the company also was able to reduce network incidents by about 30 percent.