Mavenir, which prides itself as a disruptor in the wireless networking space, is beefing up its presence around the globe and just announced the appointment of former Ericsson executive Aniruddho (Ani) Basu as senior vice president and general manager of Emerging Business, based out of its Stockholm, Sweden office.
Richardson, Texas-based Mavenir is no stranger to the European market, and it has had a presence in Stockholm for a number of years. However, in the past 12 months, it has ramped up its footprint with a new office, expanding its team and strengthening its global network of competence centers.
As for which regions are more prone to virtualizing their networks, Mavenir said it’s involved in a number of proof of concepts, trials and pilot deployments with leading service providers in the Americas and Europe.
“From our perspective, we believe that the early adopters will come from leading markets in North America and Western Europe in the near term, who have already made strides in virtualizing their core networks and are preparing to launch 5G,” Basu said via email in response to FierceWirelessTech’s inquiry. “In addition, there are also service providers in key markets like Japan, Korea and India that are taking the first steps in embracing and driving RAN virtualization.”
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Asked if Mavenir plans to respond to Dish Network’s RFI/RFP, the company declined to comment for confidentiality reasons. However, it did say it’s a strong supporter of the Dish initiatives and excited at the prospect of a key new player in the North American market that has stated its ambition for disruptive services and technology plays.
At Ericsson, Basu held several roles over the years, including VP and head of Strategy & Commercial Management for Business Area Digital Services.
According to Basu, the next technology evolution for agile, programmable and service-aware 5G networks are Mobile-Access Edge Computing or Distributed Cloud solutions.
“Most of our customer engagements including 5G RFPs/RFIs etc. reflect an increasing focus from our customers on understanding, adopting and deploying edge solutions,” he said. “Having said that, a handful of leading and early adopter service providers are exploring and implementing initiatives in this area.”
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There are dependencies on a number of factors that will drive the pace of adoption in edge networks – notably, the pace of adoption of virtualization and disaggregation/distribution in RAN, and the definition of clear use cases that will benefit from edge solutions, he noted.
“Industry maturity needs to evolve on both these dimensions before we see wide scale adoption and deployment of edge capabilities,” he said. “We therefore expect that the coming 12-18 months will be key for industry alignment on edge, followed by initial experimental deployments thereafter.”