Wind River may not be a household name, but its flagship platform stretches into many industries and applications that face common challenges. Wind River Studio, which formally debuted earlier this year, targets what CEO Kevin Dallas describes as the machine economy, or intelligent systems that can learn, adapt, and act autonomously.

Assembling and integrating a platform to develop, deploy, operate, and service the four stages of an intelligent systems lifecycle doesn’t require Wind River to reinvent the wheel so much as it needs to bring Kubernetes and containerized capabilities to the operational technology (OT) side of the world, he explained in a phone interview with SDxCentral. 

“We’re now entering the second wave of digital transformation, which is the transformation of OT,” Dallas said.

That broad outlook underpins Wind River’s cloud-native software platform for use in autonomous vehicles, robots, drones, intelligent assistants, mixed reality, and virtualized 5G radio access networks (RAN). A heavy dose of artificial intelligence (AI) also allows Wind River Studio to determine the best development environment, plumbing capabilities, and simulation environments for properly deploying services in the field, a cloud, or a 5G vRAN, according to Dallas. 

“All the CEOs, CIOs are realizing that the next wave is OT, but in order to do that I have to bring all the investments I’ve made from IT and then bring them into the OT world. Not build from scratch — bring cloud native to the OT world,” he said.

Wind River Studio Blends Internal, External Features

Wind River focuses on designing the integrated environment that various enterprises need to facilitate that shift, and plug any feature gaps with partners that specialize in specific applications or industries. As such, Wind River Studio is approximately 50% Wind River product and 50% capabilities brought in from third-party vendors.

Enterprises as recently as two years ago had to use and integrate about a dozen tools, runtimes, and capabilities to assemble a system like Wind River Studio, Dallas said, claiming the company is the first to achieve and provide this more comprehensive offering. 

The 40-year-old company’s traditional competitors are still firmly planted in the real time operating system space, and “new competitors like Red Hat and VMware, they have a cloud, but nobody has the far edge in terms of the device platform, the far-edge platform, and then the orchestration capability to be able to manage a distributed application across an intelligent system. We’re the first to do that,” he said. 

Wind River notched a significant win in the 5G vRAN space last summer when Verizon tapped the vendor, Intel, and Samsung to initiate what claimed to be the world’s first fully virtualized 5G data session — from the network core, to the RAN, and the edge of the network. 

Verizon Work Seals vRAN Ambitions

That effort ramped up this year, leading to fully virtualized 5G data sessions on the Verizon’s recently acquired C-band spectrum. The operator will expand further on that later this year, again leaning on Wind River to help it deploy and manage some of Samsung and the industry’s first fully virtualized 5G RAN equipment for mid-band spectrum packing massive MIMO. 

“Verizon, of course, moving toward 5G vRAN means that all those nodes that they have are running a virtualized radio and on that virtualized radio you have a far-edge cloud based on Wind River that runs on that node,” Dallas explained, adding that Wind River’s work with Verizon involves all four of its quadrants: develop, deploy, operate, and service. 

Vodafone also tapped Wind River earlier this summer to help the European operator build and host applications for the continent’s first commercial open RAN. The vendor remains close to Intel as the chipmaker integrates Wind River Studio with its FlexRAN reference software, processors, network adapters, and accelerators. In fact, Intel was Wind River's previous owner prior to being sold to private equity firm TPG in 2018.

Wind River’s ascension in the telco space isn’t entirely happenstance, but the timing couldn’t be better, according to Dallas. 

“We’re realizing that for these new scenarios to come to life, 5G is going to be the backbone for many of these new AI-infused applications, many of these intelligent machines,” he said. “So our role is to work with the leading communications service providers in order to make 5G available in such a way that it is a virtualized, open RAN solution, versus your traditional integrated solution.” 

Introducing commercial-off-the-shelf hardware running on virtualized software with radios from RAN leaders like Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, and others give operators greater flexibility and reduces opex and capex, Dallas added. 

Wind River stands out in product differentiation, expertise or skill sets, and the service-level agreements it’s accustomed to delivering in heavily regulated industries such as aerospace, military, industrial, medical, and energy, he said.

“From a product perspective, we are 12 to 18 months ahead of our competition in terms of performance that we’re able to deliver. This is not based on what Wind River is saying, it’s based on what our customers are saying,” Dallas said, adding that the company also leads the industry on the number of sub clouds, or nodes, that it can scale to.

These capabilities and Wind River’s experience with Verizon, Samsung, and Intel, position it well with operators that typically have a short time frame from contract to commercial deployment, he said. “We are the only partner that has actually deployed a commercial 5G vRAN solution, and we’ve done that in partnership with Samsung, with Verizon. And that carries a hell of a lot of weight because it’s very challenging. It’s been a lot of work for us to get to this point with Verizon, with Samsung.”

Verizon Project Started Off ‘Quite Choppy’

Wind River’s work with Verizon “started off really, I’d say quite choppy because we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Dallas said, adding that the vendor and others involved in that effort “backed into” the planning stages and challenges that had to be resolved to deliver proper orchestration. This went beyond the traditional integration work that occurs with radio vendors, and included chipmakers like Intel to ensure Wind River Studio can support radio applications and other containerized applications in an equally scalable way, he added.

The service also has to run seamlessly across multiple cloud environments including the nodes, the core, and public clouds, Dallas explained. “Because of this experience we now know how long it will actually take to actually do field trials, to get to commercial deployment. And we know the work that’s involved in doing that.”

Despite these complexities, Dallas contends now is the time for operators to shift to a 5G vRAN. “I shouldn’t underplay this,” he said. “It’s a complex solution to bring up, but once it’s brought up, the flexibility that the operator has is unparalleled. And the ability to run these applications at the edge is a new business opportunity for them.”

Wind River is largely focused on vRAN in the telco space today, but it’s talking with many operators that are investing in open RAN as well and it intends to push further into that arena accordingly, Dallas said. “We’re finding that the telco space is becoming the foundation for these other industries.”