Wind River last year made waves when it was selected by Boost Mobile to replace VMware as the carrier’s long-time container-as-a-service (CaaS) provider, a decision that Wind River CTO Paul Miller said involved the vendor beating out much larger rivals and highlighted Wind River’s mastery of automation and integration.

Boost Mobile ditched VMware as its CaaS provider due to what Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn termed “cost effectiveness” or a combination of “operational performance, strategic roadmap, and overall cost.” The radical move was helped by Boost Mobile having deployed a cloud-based, open architecture network that included virtualized and open radio access network (RAN) components.

“We felt we were not going to be price gouged, so we've made some changes on the CaaS layer that has allowed us to actually now be faster and better than what we were before, because we have open RAN and we're able to make these changes very, very quickly,” Albertyn said during the recent CCA Mobile Carriers Show. The executive later added that “the predatory pricing that showed up from VMware, price gouging from some other people is not something that we looked forward to.”

Wind River’s Miller said the vendor was able to quickly fill this gap due to its cloud technology stack. This includes a CaaS layer that’s based on the open source StarlingX project, a single pane of glass analytics platform to manage distributed cloud, and its Conductor software management platform that allowed Boost Mobile to orchestrate a complex environment.

More telling is that Miller said Wind River was able to use this package to “beat out competitors like AWS [Amazon Web Services] and Red Hat for Boost’s business last year. Specifically, because that high level of automation and integration with the underlying systems allow you to very cost effectively and very simply deploy and operate these systems at super high scale.”

Miller also noted that Wind River tapped into its initial work at the network edge to help control total cost of ownership (TCO).

“We started at the far edge, and that actually turned out to be a challenge that was well mated to our DNA because that was all real time, software-defined radio, hardware accelerators, the kind of thing Wind River is really good at, so we solved a lot of those problems,” Miller said. “As we start moving to the core, it actually becomes a lot easier. When you drop the accelerators you don't need the kernel performance that you do at the real time. You can leverage some of the cost efficiencies. We fit down to a single server at the far edge, so when you get to the core you get a real payback in TCO.”

That work and deployment remains ongoing with Boost Mobile where Wind River is running the network core, IT enterprise, and back-office systems.

“Literally, there will be zero nodes left of VMware in their network. It will be 100 percent Wind River,” Miller said of that transition. “That is kind of indicative of what we're doing in our business. We're shifting from being an open RAN, vRAN player, where that opportunity originally surfaced, now moving into telco core and IT enterprise with our Kubernetes solution, competing more directly in the territory that Red Hat's comfortable in.”

Boost Mobile’s decision to go with Wind River was not without precedence.

Verizon nearly five years ago selected Wind River’s Kubernetes and container-based middleware to link an underlying Intel Xeon-based infrastructure and Samsung virtualized radio access network (vRAN) units to power the carrier’s virtualized 5G network efforts. That partnership continues to power tens-of-thousands of Verizon’s RAN sites.

“It took us several years of blood, sweat, and tears to harden that platform and make it mission ready and high availability,” Miller said of that work. “It's an extremely robust system.”

Wind River’s AI focus

Wind River is rapidly building on that robust system by layering in AI capabilities.

The vendor recently struck a deal through parent company Aptiv that integrates ServiceNow’s AI-powered customer retention management (CRM) to help enterprises manage their assets; an expanded deal with Capgemini to help enterprises better manage and modernize their infrastructure and applications; to integrate Nota AI’s on-device AI optimization to help manage edge environments; and SiMa.ai to integrate AI-focused hardware and software systems.

Miller explained that these AI efforts are focused on tapping into Wind River’s automation work to help better manage these increasingly complex systems.

“We provide the ability to do automations operation, to deploy, manage these software assets and complex topologies of systems,” Miller said. “That's the way that we're entering the AI landscape as it were. … To bring the whole story home is on the infrastructure side, silicon enablement and platform enablement for software, and then on the orchestration and automation side, the ability to manage these hugely diverse systems.”