Tech Mahindra is happy to do the dirty work in helping telecommunication operators through the complex migration of their networks toward cloud-based architectures so they can generate a financial return on their 5G investments.

“I am very happy to be the plumber of the world,” Manish Vyas, CEO for network services and president of Tech Mahindra’s Communications, Media, and Entertainment business, proudly told SDxCentral of his firm’s role as a systems integrator (SI).

The India-based firm is a worldwide provider of SI work for the telecommunications space. That work is becoming increasingly important for the telecom ecosystem in bridging the forward-leaning expertise of the cloud and software markets with the hardware-based legacy equipment that continues to dominate current telecom networks.

A classic example was Tech Mahindra’s 10-digit-dollar deal with AT&T that it signed in late 2019. That multi-year agreement called for the IT consultancy to assume management of many of the applications that support AT&T’s network.

ABI Research ranked Tech Mahindra as a “mainstream” SI provider of 5G services for enterprises, alongside rivals like Accenture, TCS, and Kyndryl. That tier was below “market leaders” Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NTT, Atos, and Capgemini Engineering, and ahead of “followers” Infosys, Wipro, World Wide Technology (WWT), and Logicalis.

“Outside of China and Korea, every telco is a big customer of ours,” Vyas said. “We take the learnings from there and ensure that we give back to the same client and others. … All of these IPs that we have built over the years is a result of everything that we have absorbed, and the customers have been very happy to share that because we give back to them.”

Simplification and automation

Vyas noted that the current focus of Tech Mahindra’s SI “plumbing” work is in helping operators to simplify and automate the management of their increasingly complex networks.

“Telcos are clearly focused on simplifying everything,” Vyas said. “Simplifying operations, simplifying the modernization stack, simplifying what they will be focusing on or not focusing on from a revenue standpoint. Everything is around simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

That simplification is increasingly relying on automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

“It’s table stakes today,” Igal Elbaz, SVP and network CTO at AT&T, noted of automation and AI during a presentation at the recent MWC Barcelona 2023 event. “It’s critical to the success of building large-scale networks. We are continuing to introduce large-scale technologies into the network and when we design and we architect these we always think about how we’re going to operate this. What’s the level of automation, what’s the level of possibly AI over time, we all have this vision of autonomous networks.”

Vyas explained that this level of automation and AI will allow for a broader move left that can help network management be more proactive rather than reactive.

“Eighty-percent of the network maintenance, network management costs, this goes toward access networks, and 90% of that goes in preventive and reactive. That's just not tenable. That's not viable long term. It's not sustainable. We'll have to do something about it,” Vyas said. “What we're trying to do is move that left, to move more and more toward predictive, eventually cognitive, move away as much as possible from the reactive axis and more toward the predictive axis. … That I think is honestly worth billions of dollars of volatility in the marketplace. It’s not easy to tackle but we are focused on that.”

Partnerships toward SI goals

Toward those goals, Tech Mahindra at the MWC Barcelona 2023 event launched its Sandstorm remote real-time network monitoring and smart device assurance service targeted at telecom operators and enterprises. It also expanded work with Microsoft as part of that hyperscaler’s recently bolstered Azure Operator Nexus Ready program.

More recently, Tech Mahindra partnered with Red Hat to help operators move 5G and mobile edge computing (MEC) workloads to hybrid-cloud environments. This work uses Red Hat’s OpenShift platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Tech Mahindra’s netOps.ai automation platform.

And it created a new Cisco Business Unit to help its more than 1,200 global enterprise and telecom operator customers to adopt Cisco products and services. This includes Cisco’s SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE), full-stack observability, managed Wi-Fi networks, routed optical networks, carrier IP networks, and 5G platforms.

“We understand the problem statement,” Vyas said. “We understand the hyperscalars need us, the telcos need us, software vendors need us, and in some areas we have done our own IP creation. We believe there is a vacuum here. There is nobody focused on that. … All of our capabilities are around helping realize the value of the technology, by integrating it, and by helping realize the value of the business case. … That’s how we look at the world.”