Opanga Networks unveiled new leadership and new services targeted at helping network operators tap artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to better optimize network performance. These new services build on a platform the vendor has been offering to operators through a partnership with Cisco.

The new leadership is in the form of Cole Brodman, who was recently named CEO of the vendor. Brodman replaced founder Dave Gibbons, who is remaining on the Seattle-based vendor’s board of directors.

Brodman spent more than 11 years at T-Mobile US, where he served as chief development officer, chief technology and innovation officer, and chief marketing officer. He joined Opanga as a board member and advisor in 2015.

As part of the leadership change, Opanga also unveiled a pair of network optimization services to form the vendor’s newly formed Rain product platform.

The new offerings include the Joule product, which uses a closed-loop AI-powered system to create bandwidth-on-demand energy savings at a radio access network (RAN) site. Brodman in an interview with SDxCentral said the product was being tested by a European operator and producing energy saving of up to 40% per cell site by optimizing the utilization of radio channels.

Opanga’s other new product is Merlin, which provides network analytics and business intelligence from the network. Brodman said this was important to allow operators to gain actionable information from data they can collect on their networks.

“We did some really unique things to make sure the data we capture and we save is actionable and in real time around a historical basis,” Brodman said. “They can go and draw the information they need out of it to help with capacity planning, future quality-of-service decisions with understanding of what's happening at a real level versus a highly average level on the radio networks from a throughput perspective.”

This sort of insight was recently highlighted by Craig Silliman, president of Verizon Global Services, who during an investor conference said that the carrier “ingests over 70 billion data points off the network every single day into our AI engines.”

“AI and analytics engines are only as good as the data you put into them,” Silliman said. “We have an enormous body of data across Verizon, but it sits in 29,000 different data sources, which in many ways are fragmented, we don’t have common taxonomy. So the journey we’re on right now is bringing all of our data together into common platforms and common governance and taxonomy structures.”

Opanga’s approach to tackling this burden is by combining the new Joule and Merlin products with its long-standing Peregrine RAN optimization product as part of the Rain platform. Brodman said this combination can be deployed on any server or cloud environment and when optimized can process 400 gigabits per second of traffic on a single three-unit (3u) server.

Riding Cisco toward market differentiation

Opanga’s product bolstering comes at a time of increased AI and ML interest by network operators and their vendor partners. Analysys Mason noted that a recent survey of communication service providers found that 94% were engaged in at least one test or trial of RAN AI.

However, operators often go with what they are familiar with when it comes to deploying new technologies. Brodman labeled this as a “lack of muscle memory for new things.”

“Because you build and deploy at such a massive scale as a telecom operator, you tend to do the same things oftentimes over and over again,” Brodman said. “I think when people come in with new approaches, kind of orthogonal to the way you’ve been thinking about things in the past, it sometimes takes a very receptive audience to look at those things.”

Brodman said the Opanga platform differs from offerings from larger rivals in that it’s vendor and platform agnostic.

“We don't really care what generation of radio you're running. We don't really care if it's mobile, fixed wireless, fixed telecom. We don't care what vendors you're using,” Brodman said of the Opanga platform. “We built it and architected it in a way that makes it completely flexible from an architectural, generation and vendor perspective.”

Brodman also cited work Opanga has been doing with Cisco, which includes Cisco being a distributor of Opanga’s services for several years. Brodman noted that Cisco’s Ultra Traffic Optimization (CUTO) platform “is their version of our product.”

“It’s the exact same software but built in their mobile packet core,” Brodman said.

Brodman noted that its partnership with companies like Cisco is key for Opanga in positioning itself in the market.

“This is software,” Brodman said. “We can deploy quickly. We can deploy on commodity servers. We can deploy it in virtualized instances. We sit on standard interfaces and the network core, so within a matter of days an operator can move that fast. We can have a trial up and running to show them what's possible with our energy savings product, with our network optimization products, with our analytics tools. And then from there, I think, the sky's the limit on what's possible.”