An ambitious new startup called B.Yond is setting its sights on helping U.S. carriers and others navigate to a software-driven world through automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and more.
The company, which is the result of a spinoff from Nexius, says it’s working with leading telcos and industry agitators to build the “infinite network.” The company plans to provide automated, software-defined networking using a combination of open source software, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Working closely on trials with major players including Facebook, SK telecom, and the largest US service providers, B.Yond has unparalleled insights into the mounting pressure the service providers are under. A paradigm shift is required,” said Ned Taleb, CEO of B.Yond and co-founder of Nexius, in a prepared statement. “We will bring automation and artificial intelligence and services to market to solve a broken business model and unleash the potential of network assets for the benefit of society.”
Nexius is one of the initial members of Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) that was officially unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2016. The company also was one of the 10 companies selected to receive the 2016 AT&T Supplier Award for work in helping AT&T achieve its network goals. AT&T is on track to virtualize more than 75% of its network by 2020.
The Nexius family of companies employs about 1,000 people. The B.Yond division employs about 200, but it could be considered competition for some of the big, more traditional firms like Nokia, Ericsson and Cisco, which all recognize the need to be more software driven and in some cases, doing layoffs as they transition. B.Yond also could in some ways compete with consulting companies like Amdocs or Accenture.
Kathleen Willard, head of global marketing strategy and business development, said the company is a new-age networking software company operating across a number of realms. The TIP, for example, has brought many operators into the ecosystem and everybody is working together to understand how to enable the network of the future for telcos.
The team behind B.Yond has a track record of working with over-the-top (OTT) and service providers to build automation solutions and currently is developing solutions based on AI for software-defined “unlimitable” networks and cloudlets. B.Yond says it is currently in trials with "marquee customers and industry agitators."
Johnny Ghibril, VP for software solutions and strategy at Nexius, acknowledged that there are a lot of competing platforms in the open source world right now, and some of the smaller carriers, especially outside the U.S., are fine with being late adopters of virtualization standards, preferring to wait and see how others do it and what emerges as successful.