The Ericsson hosting offering initially includes solutions for MMS, push to talk, streaming, pre-paid and content settlement, as well as distribution of and content management for music, entertainment, and games, etc. The operators and service providers will benefit from Ericsson's technology world leadership and relationships with thousands of application and content developers.

"The operators and service providers are able to focus on marketing of services to their customers while Ericsson gets the service up and running," says Hans Vestberg, Senior Vice President, Ericsson Global Services. "They can spend less on capital and operations, and focus on growing their business and customer relationships."

Ericsson's new hosting offering reinforces the trend toward managed services in which operators and vendors work as partners to reduce costs and bring new services to market as quickly as possible.