Cloud-Native Telco Transformation Journey – A TelecomTV Interview With Mavenir’s Bejoy Pankajakshan

Thank you for the question. I think one of the key things that we are seeing as we look at deployments across the globe via North America, Europe, or APAC, the underlying foundation which is the platform used for these containerized deployments is a key factor. Today, the leaders in that space include players like Red Hat, IBM, VMware, Wind River. There are of course public cloud providers as well: AWS, Google, Azure, IBM. In that context, having the right platform and ensuring it can support different applications is one of the key factors. Whether it's a user plane application handling very high throughput versus a control plane application doing signaling, in both cases you need to ensure the underlying container platform can support these varieties. So that's number one. The other key part is that as you have different applications with different requirements around monitoring and logging, we have seen how the OSS side of network management has evolved. Having common OSS tools for fault management, monitoring, log analysis, especially security monitoring, and having a common DevOps or CI/CD pipeline that works across operators and across different vendor workloads is key as we look at infrastructure where a mix of vendors play together to bring a solution.

So as we look at 5G, one of the key things to highlight is that 5G is probably the first technology in which you have not just 3GPP driven activity but also a lot of open source activity from non-standard organizations. For example, in Open RAN, work was driven through the O-RAN community, then ETSI, the Linux Foundation, the CNCF. On the product side for Open RAN, work is driven through O-RAN, but the container platform work has been driven through the open source community, particularly the CNCF and Linux Foundation, where Kubernetes—the orchestration layer for workloads in public and private clouds—has been a major driver. As we move toward cloud-native containerized deployments, tools become available through the open source community, leading to lower operational costs, common tooling across operator domains, and faster innovation. Previously, solutions were dependent on single vendors; now products delivered in open source are tested by enterprises and hyperscalers like Google, AWS, Azure, making adoption easier for operators. In summary, in open architecture deployments like Open RAN and 5G core, the availability of these tools and software becomes easier and faster, leading to better innovation.

Yes, it's an interesting question. Mavenir's history is as a software company with a vision to enable our applications to run 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G in a multi-cloud environment. In the last three to four years, we've seen more relationships between hyperscalers and operators as workloads move to public clouds—initially IT and billing, but now core telco workloads like data processing are running in public clouds, such as with AWS. For us, multi-cloud has been key in product strategy. For example, in disaster recovery, workloads can run in a public cloud and scale out in case of disaster, reducing total network cost. On network as a service, at MWC this year, the Open Gateway initiative launched by operators like T-Mobile, Dutch Telecom, and Telefonica shows the marriage between hyperscalers and operators. NaaS isn't new—location and texting were sold as APIs in 3G and 4G—but over-the-top players like Twilio capitalized. With 5G's true cloud-native, programmable network, operators can now deploy cloud-native networks and open solutions like Open RAN and 5G core to expose capabilities via APIs. This creates monetization opportunities. Mavenir is excited operators are going down this path because it requires true cloud-native applications, which is where Mavenir differentiates itself.

Thank you. Thanks for having me and look forward to more conversations.