Wind River, an ascendant player in the 5G network virtualization space, was acquired by the automotive technology company Aptiv for $4.3 billion in cash today. 

The 40-year-old company’s operational technology software stretches into many industries, including autonomous vehicles, drones, intelligent assistants, mixed reality, and virtualized 5G radio access networks (RAN). Wind River was previously owned by Intel before the chipmaker sold the company to private equity firm TPG in 2018. 

Wind River Studio, which formally debuted in early 2021, brings Kubernetes and containers to a cloud-native 5G edge network platform that allows operators to develop, deploy, operate, and manage 5G distributed edge clouds.

“All the CEOs, CIOs are realizing that the next wave is operational technology, 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,” CEO Kevin Dallas told SDxCentral in an August 2021 interview.

Wind River notched a significant win in the 5G vRAN space in August 2020 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’s 4G LTE and 5G radio access nodes now have virtual basebands associated with most of them, and the operator’s 5G standalone core, which has yet to be deployed, will run on its cloud platform in a webscale architecture, Adam Koeppe, Verizon’s SVP of network technology and planning, explained in a recent interview.

Verizon is also 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. 

Vodafone also tapped Wind River last summer to help the European operator build and host applications for the continent’s first commercial open RAN.

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

“We’re realizing that for these new scenarios to come to life, 5G is going to be the backbone for many of these new artificial intelligence-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.”

Commercial off-the-shelf hardware running on virtualized software with radios from RAN leaders like Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, and others gives operators greater flexibility and reduces opex and capex, Dallas said at the time, claiming Wind River has a 12-18 month lead on its competition. 

The transition to 5G vRAN is complex, “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,” he added. 

Wind River claims its software touches more than two billion edge devices across more than 1,700 customers globally, and said it generated about $400 million in revenue in 2021. Aptiv said it plans to use Wind River Studio to develop software-defined systems for the auto industry, and continue to invest and develop the platform for other industries it serves, including telecom.

Back in August, when SDxCentral asked Dallas about a potential IPO or change of ownership, he said: “I’m not really really thinking about that right now, in terms of what kind of an exit should it be.”

He concluded: “We’re the leader today in intelligent edge software, and we need to extend that leadership now to be the leader in intelligent systems at the edge.”

Aptiv, a public company with a current market cap of nearly $43 billion, certainly embraced and bought into that vision.