President & Chief Executive Officer, Mavenir Systems, Inc.
Beyond Innovation S3: Pardeep Kohli, Mavenir
Mavenir is reinventing the architecture of telecom infrastructure. Beyond Innovation's Anthony Lacavera asks Mavenir's President and CEO, Pardeep Kohli, how carriers can keep up with the growing demand for capacity for optimized mobile traffic, including examples of the potential of 5G.
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About Pardeep Kohli
In February 2017, Pardeep Kohli discussed the formation of a "new Mavenir," created through the combination of three companies—Ranzure, Mitel Mobile, and Mavenir—over a six-month period. Kohli stated that the combined entity offers a complete end-to-end wireless network portfolio based on software-only, virtualized solutions, positioning it for 5G deployment. He described the company as having about 2,500 people and $400 million in revenue, and characterized it as "number one" among companies focused purely on open software for the full portfolio, while noting that larger vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE remain focused on proprietary, hardware-centric solutions. Kohli also addressed industry trends, saying that operators face cost pressure from data growth without corresponding revenue increases. He argued that operators must adopt approaches similar to those used by IT companies like Google and Facebook, including open-source software and data center-based architectures, to avoid a potential "meltdown." In a 2015 overview, Kohli described Mavenir's focus on enabling operators to migrate voice, SMS, and MMS services to IP-based LTE networks, and to compete with over-the-top players like WhatsApp and Skype by providing technologies such as Rich Communication Services (RCS) for messaging, video calling, and file sharing.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
At first glance, the concept of 5G might seem like merely the next evolution of wireless technology and networks. But thanks to cloud-first, software-based solutions that run on standard computer hardware and open architectures that bring much more flexibility, reliability, and scalability to wireless networks, there are transformational leaps happening every day. Mavenir is an emerging leader in open architecture wireless network infrastructure solutions that are making the promise of an artificial intelligence-driven connected everything world a reality for everyone. Many people would be surprised to learn that wireless telecom networks are actually very closed architectures. There's a few big vendors that make all the hardware and software and dominate the market, and it's not open architecture like the rest of the internet and other applications. Mavenir is trying to completely reinvent that architecture, and you've deployed some great solutions to do that. What are the key differences between the Mavenir platform and those legacy telecom infrastructure solutions?
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Pardeep Kohli1:14
No, you're right. You know, we are using more applications on the devices, the number of devices is increasing, we access a lot of content on our mobile devices. All the content actually runs in a cloud environment. So really, in between our devices and the cloud application, there's a telco network, and that's the only thing which today is actually not cloud native, right? It's still running on proprietary systems, it does not adopt the cloud technology. So what Mavenir is actually doing is taking the whole end-to-end software for the telco environment and making it cloud native so that it can actually run as a cloud application well.
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Interviewer1:52
And the demand is growing so rapidly. Just I think about my own usage of mobile devices transitioning from talk and text to video, consumed non-stop now. How do you help carriers keep up with that growing demand?
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Pardeep Kohli1:58
Now that's where the whole benefit of having a scalable environment makes sense. Because when you buy a proprietary system, you have to buy it for the peak capacity whether you use it or not, right? Typically, for example, I come from India and there's a cricket match, and it happens in UK and other places too, and everybody's eyes on it. During the cricket match, the traffic on a mobile environment goes off, you know, four times higher. But the cricket match doesn't happen every day; it happens like three or four weeks in a year for a few hours in a day. And you have to build your network for the peak capacity for those types of environments. Similarly, on New Year's holidays, everybody wants to send a message on Happy New Year, and only between 10 o'clock and 1 o'clock we get the peak traffic, and it's three or four times more, but you're building for that capacity. So what we are actually enabling is to be able to scale in and out without involving humans, right? So this is where the whole concept of artificial intelligence and the full cloud tools which help in scaling and scaling out, so you can have on-demand capacity which you use for the time you need it, and then of course you give it up and other applications can use it.
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Interviewer3:10
The telecom environment is evolving rapidly, and you've got a number of interesting use cases of the Mavenir platform, including an end-to-end solution you're deploying here in Bermuda with Paradise Mobile, a new carrier where I happen to be an investor and I'm pretty excited about Paradise. But I'm really curious: why is it interesting for Mavenir to put this much focus on the Paradise opportunity?
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Pardeep Kohli3:36
There's a lot of talk about 5G and what are the use cases 5G will bring, but there are really not many clean examples shown working on an end-to-end basis. So if you go to a museum, let's say go to Washington DC, go to Smithsonian Museum, but the moment you get the air via device, the network guarantees you a fixed, good quality of service slice without the usual delays, low latency in the network. That's correct, and to offer that you need actually a good coordination across many components in the network. So that's the capability we'll get with Paradise because, of course, we are providing an end-to-end solution. It's not a huge network, but it's not small either. Most important, the Paradise founders, I spent quite a bit of time with them, and they are coming with the same vision. They want to bring something new in the market and use their network in Bermuda as not only a testing ground for new applications, but once you create it, produce it, test it, we also export it.
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Interviewer4:37
There's a lot of promise for democratizing healthcare, for example, and elevating education as well as healthcare, and making it accessible, affordable, and available to people that don't have it today. Where do you see Mavenir playing a role in bringing that population up to the Western standards of healthcare and education?
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Pardeep Kohli4:55
We are working with the partners to be able to do it predictably, where you can actually when they move a hand in New York, it actually moves a robotic arm in Bermuda. That will enable a lot of different use cases where, you know, remotely you can provide healthcare service.