Mavenir is continuing to push its open and virtualized radio access network (RAN) offering into new markets. The Texas-based vendor today announced a collaborative effort with NEC to deliver local and private 5G networks for enterprises in Japan.

Earlier this week Mavenir inked a deal with Mugler, a systems integrator, to foster the advancement of 5G vRAN, a 5G network core, and digital services for German enterprises. Mugler also plans to deploy a private 5G network riding on Mavenir’s technology on its campus in Oberlungwitz, Germany.

Mavenir’s fully virtualized 4G and 5G open RAN offering became commercially available to operators in October 2019. Vodafone and Telefónica are its two largest publicly announced customers to date. Mavenir also opened an innovation center in Stockholm, Sweden, which puts it in close proximity to Ericsson’s headquarters and where it demonstrated a data traffic transmission over open RAN interface technology in a 5G New Radio (NR).

“We are actually deploying products for carrying live traffic in commercial markets,” Mavenir CEO Pardeep Kohli told SDxCentral in a phone interview last week. Those efforts are all based on 4G LTE today, but plans are underway to evolve to a 5G environment operating in standalone mode, he explained.

Mavenir has captured some momentum with big global operators, but “in the U.S. market I guess we are having more success with the smaller operators,” Kohli said. Mavenir’s portfolio is comprised of the application layer, IP multimedia subsystems (IMS), the packet core, and RAN equipment housed in white boxes.

“We offer software in the network, which in then using all the software you can actually build in a new greenfield network or take an existing network and make it more cloud native and virtualized,” Kohli said. “We believe at the end of the day, as the software component increases it kind of goes in our direction.”

As an open RAN evangelist, Mavenir encourages operators and enterprises to buy their own hardware. “Our advantage is to run our software on the lowest hardware footprint,” he explained, adding that this leads to lower costs and removes any incentive to sell more hardware.

“We believe that we will have much more optimized software running in the cloud, and in that case it results in a lower cost of running the network,” Kohli said.

Mavenir recently published an infographic, based on research by Strategy Analytics, that claimed mobile operators will save $31 billion during the next five years by adopting open RAN. In addition to lower hardware costs, open RAN enables operators to maintain networks with a significantly smaller staff.

AT&T’s six-year effort to virtualize its core network functions with SDN and other technologies is resulting in dramatic job losses this year. The company recently said it plans to cut $1.5 billion in labor-related costs in 2020.

“With that move toward SDN, the labor reductions are substantial,” Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics, said at the time. “If you go SDN, your workforce is extremely scalable because everything becomes super straightforward and automated.”

Indeed, one of the biggest benefits of SDN is automation — a bonafide job killer in any industry.

Open RAN removes the need for operators to put people at every site location to verify network performance because workloads are handled in the cloud, according to Kohli. “If it works for one site, it should work everywhere else because the application is done not by humans, but by the tools,” he said.

“That’s how you lose all the opex cost,” Kohli added. “Look at how Facebook runs — there are 2.5 billion people using their network and then look at their head count versus the AT&Ts of the world or the Verizons of the world.”