Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Nur Atikah Yusri, Journalist, AOPG

One, build a world-class team in APAC.

Two, in 18 to 24 months, ensure that the company has aided 80% of mobile operators across the Asia Pacific.

Three, expand to enterprise businesses.

Four, build a strong partner network in the Asia Pacific.

Five, create industrial ambassadors.

These are the five goals that Dipesh Ranjan has set for himself in his new position as Mavenir’s Senior Vice-President and Head of the Asia-Pacific Region. With two decades of experience in the industry and having worked with telecom technologies, IT technologies, cybersecurity, cloud, software-defined network and network virtualisation, the SVP sat down with us in an interview to discuss Mavenir as a company and the current state of the network industry.

“One Network. Any Cloud. All Software.” is the slogan of the telecommunication software company that describes itself as the only end-to-end, cloud-native network software provider in the current market. Dipesh likens Mavenir’s efforts in the network industry to the actions of cloud providers with the infrastructure industry stating, “We are building the future of networks and creating newer technologies focusing on a vision of, a single software-based automated network, which can run on any cloud infrastructure. It’s just one end-to-end, cloud-native software provider company, which provides end to end application software and, portfolio for communication service providers around the world.”

Currently, the company serves over 250 businesses in 120 countries and has a presence in 9 APAC countries, including Australia, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Taiwan. Some of their clientele within the region include Axiata, Rakuten, Airtel, Telkomsel, Globe Telecom and NTT DOCOMO.

When asked to comment regarding Mavenir as a company, Dipesh notes, “We are the disruptors. We are innovators. We are innovating every day. How can we bring transformation in the industry? We have a very strong R&D team. If you look at our portfolio, we have operations around the world and one of the largest R&D teams working around the clock on building world-class, platforms, software, and products. And the amount of flexibility we bring to the market in transformation for operators as an enterprise customer is unprecedented.”

Transformational Changes for Network Providers

Among other topics discussed with the SVP included the effects of digital innovation on network providers. Dipesh notes that technological transformations have impacted the network industry in many ways. On a general level, he states, “There are impacts on the wide-area network side, which [are] where you can see a cloudification of SD-WAN kind of solution, there are the technology impacts on the network security side, then there you will see a lot of cloud security being built. And there is an impact on things which are more on the mobile network side.”

In terms of the impacts that Mavenir has observed on the mobile network side, it can be said that mobile operators have found value in virtualisation. As a result, the interest in open architecture has increased as mobile operators avoid being restricted to services and solutions from a single provider. Companies looking for more visibility into their network functions and increased network security are leaning more towards the concept of Open RAN, which Mavenir supports.

In terms of cloudification and software-isation, due to the pandemic and forced remote working conditions, Dipesh comments that most mobile operators are looking to and have already begun building their infrastructure on the cloud. This cloudification also results in the ability to gain more resources from less. The reduction of TCO from moving a 5G core to the cloud has been significant for some companies, as he references recent research. Similarly, most of these companies have also had conversations around the multi-generation network as it is essential to be agile when catering to their customers.

With regards to the monetisation of 5G, Dipesh explains, “The real monetisable value of 5G is that it fulfils the adaption of a multivendor end to end programmable and automated service delivery model. That essentially will ideally transform how communication service providers deliver high-value services to their end customer, which are either enterprises, consumers, or their large ecosystem.”

From his explanation, the monetisation of 5G can be distributed into three categories:

• Extreme mobile broadband and fixed wireless access.
• Critical real-time communication.
• Machine-to-machine communication.

“5G has ushered in a new age of ecosystem experience, because of the API exposure CSPs need to continuously expand their vendor ecosystem to gain access to the most innovative third-party API based services. And programmability, why, because, in addition to automation adoption and ecosystem expansion, mobile networks are programmable today,” states Dipesh.

Some of the examples of 5G monetisation includes smart farming, smart logistics, advanced healthcare, smart manufacturing and the modernisation of mining and gas operations that Mavenir has recently ventured into with a company in Australia.

Conclusions

We wrapped up our conversation with a few last words from Dipesh to our readers firstly regarding Mavenir, “So, to the people who are the readers of your publication, my messaging to them will be to partner with us. We are flexible to work with them in terms of whatever network optimisation customisation they are looking at, and they don’t have to really be, under the shackles of fixed and proprietary architecture and providers and so on.”

On a more personal note, Dipesh comments, “I look forward to working with all of you more and more, to bring the narrative to the market and bring more leadership to the APJ market. At the same time, happy to have more talented people willing to join us and happy to talk with talented people in the market who want to work with us because we are building a world-class team. And so, whoever is the reader, if they’re interested in working with us, I am very happy to chat with them.”

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