Mavenir today revealed a raft of new services to address unique webscale, edge, and artificial intelligence (AI) requirements of network operators.

The cloud-based software added to Mavenir’s portfolio include platforms for webscale deployments, AI and analytics, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and digital enablement.

Mavenir’s Webscale Platform, which is based on Kubernetes, extends the enterprise IT and webscale platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with telco-specific functions that are open interface and based on open source. 

The service was developed in conjunction with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and LF Networking, a Linux Foundation group, which is working on webscale technologies through its XGVela project that targets upper layer services as PaaS functions and is designed to enable more cloud deployments among network operators.

Mavenir contributed its telco cloud integration layer software to XGVela and CNCF to create the basis for its webscale PaaS. “We enable in any cloud deployment model by having this telco-enabled PaaS on top of standard [containers-as-a-service] and PaaS, which then allows you to meet the telco-specific requirements,” Bejoy Pankajakshan, chief strategy officer at Mavenir, told SDxCentral.

Mavenir’s Webscale Platform acts as a layer that operators can deploy alongside their respective cloud frameworks. “It could be running in any cloud environment, so it could be within the telco private cloud, which can be in edges or in data centers or then the core. It could be public clouds like either an Amazon region, or Outpost, or Anthos, or edge depending upon which public cloud you want to run,” Pankajakshan said.

Cloud providers aren’t currently providing this level of specificity for network operators and hyperscalers are increasingly working with carriers to address requirements for reliability, regulation adherence, and proper data storage and collection, he added. “If you take a standard [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or Elastic Compute Cloud] distribution of Kubernetes you don’t get these capabilities.”

Mavenir’s AI-powered analytics platform expands the vendor’s previous work in this realm on voice, messaging, and data to make it more applicable for radios, the network core, and automation. The company is introducing radio intelligent controller (RIC) services, network function data analytics, and AIOps within that platform.

The vendor also last month announced plans to more forcefully become a bonafide supplier of radios under a new business unit.

On the edge computing front, the vendor is introducing a platform that will enable edge computing within an operator network that it plans to make available later this year. Mavenir is also working with Nvidia and Mellanox to allow packet core functionality to be deployed at the edge of the network, and integrating its software development kit with other vendors to benefit specific edge applications in industrial automation, augmented or virtual reality, video surveillance, and autonomous driving.

“In general, 5G use cases are extending the telco networks more into the hyperscale environment. This increasing hyperscale ambition is to control the network infrastructure in which their services rely,” Pankajakshan said. “Hyperscaler’s goal is to use the cloud experience and knowledge to bring as much of the network domains as possible to the cloud, which gives them the ability to deploy their own telco cloud.”

Mavenir’s contribution there is to provide software that can run edge applications in any cloud-native environment and monetize those services, he added. The vendors’ Digital Enablement platform also addresses operators’ desire to generate revenue from new services.

A tier-one operator in India is using Mavenir’s Webscale Platform today and the vendor expects other existing operator customers to follow suit. Integrated edge computing services are expected to be deployed with some operators in the first half of this year, and the new RIC, network function data analytics, and AIOps services are currently in trials with multiple operators in Europe, according to Pankajakshan.

“The reason why this is still in trials or proof-of-concept is because it’s still only going through the initial open radio access network (RAN) deployments,” he explained. “It’s not like we’ve had wide scale open RAN deployments yet.”

RIC is the only new service announced by Mavenir today that’s specific to open RAN. 

“We’re able to provide all of this because we’ve got a suite of applications that touch everything from the radio to the core, including packet core and [IP Multimedia Subsystem],” Pankajakshan said. “That’s also an important differentiator for Mavenir … as opposed to the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, and others. Having a software pedigree and doing and having done all of these solutions in software makes us more incentivized to have these cloud-native solutions out in the market ahead of the competition.”