Just days after announcing it was being acquired by India’s Reliance for $67.82 million, system integrator Radisys debuted a new program called Open Business Accelerator that is intended to make it easier for service providers to launch open source solutions in their networks.
What’s interesting is that Radisys’ accelerator program is targeting specific areas that it believes will make 5G deployment easier and faster. Areas ripe for partnerships, according to Radisys, include RAN decomposition and the evolution of the open RAN.
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The company said it is looking for partners that are working with open source initiatives such as members of the Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP) OpenRAN group, the xRAN Forum, the ORAN Alliance, and the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD). Radisys is a big proponent of CORD; the company in 2016 contributed its evolved packet core (EPC) framework to the CORD project to create a virtual EPC (vEPC).
The company also is a member of xRAN and has been working with TIP to disaggregate the eNodeB into functional components aligned around the LTE protocol layers. “We’ve made several contributions of our IP to the community to build the ecosystem for open source solutions, and we are actively involved in several TIP projects such as OpenCellular, OpenRAN, vRAN fronthaul, and solutions integration,” said Natasha Tamaskar, vice president, global marketing, channels, and sales strategy for Radisys.
But Radisys’ Accelerator program is different from these standards groups because it isn’t setting open standards. Instead it is supporting the work of these groups and building solutions based upon those open reference frameworks. According to Tamaskar, this Accelerator program is about “solution integration and hardening,” and speed to market for service providers.
Besides open RAN, the company is looking for partners involved in multi-access edge computing (MEC) and software-defined networking enabled broadband access evolution (SEBA).
Other areas of interest include media intelligence, which Radisys describes as the enabling of real-time voice and video services that leverage flexible media services and will reduce CapEx and OpEx. And SDN and NFV cloud networking, which are products that enable service providers to have more network visibility, monitoring, and network control in the 5G environment and will also reduce costs.
Tamaskar says that one example of a current Radisys partnership that is already working on a go-to-market solution is its work with Intel on 5G reference designs for trials with service providers. In this program, Radisys is leveraging its 3GPP Release 15 compliant 5G software suite.
Marketing Partnership
Nevertheless, much of the program sounds like a marketing partnership in which Accelerator members will work together on joint sales and marketing campaigns and share their product roadmaps. The members also will offer training workshops.
Radisys is hoping to include partners from around the globe and therefore help companies expand and sell their products in new geographic regions and markets.
Not surprisingly, Radisys is tapping some existing partnerships to support its accelerator program. For example, Radisys is a partner-level member of the Open Networking Forum and ONF is supporting this accelerator. ONF Executive Director Guru Parulkar said that Radisys brings deep expertise to various open source initiatives like CORD and Stratum that enable operators to minimize vendor lock-in.
Other partners include Modulo, which makes VoLTE and IP multimedia systems (IMS) solutions for telecom operators; Adlink, which makes gateways and edge computing devices; test equipment firm Rohde & Schwarz; and Microtel, which makes network monitoring products.
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