Last week, The Fast Mode spoke to Natasha Tamaskar, VP & Head of Business Strategy & Global Marketing at Radisys in a brief interview on
How has the last 18 months panned out, and what are your expectations for MWC 2021?
The last 18 months have yielded a different, but successful year for Radisys. While the pandemic changed the way we live, learn and work, the importance of connectivity became paramount and the telecom industry remails critical. Radisys took the challenges of the pandemic and used them as a springboard for innovation, collaboration and leadership in the ecosystem. Our team understands that as we emerge from a year of uncertainty, the industry and consumers are relying on service providers and the vendor community to keep momentum for delivering mobile connectivity and broadband access for all.
Open RAN continued to gain traction over the last year as service providers explored new open architectures to build their 5G networks. The Open RAN Policy Coalition formed in May 2020 and we joined its efforts to educate policymakers and the global industry about the benefits of Open RAN. Radisys continued to hold leadership roles within several industry organizations, including the Small Cell Forum where we contributed to the successful launch of its next-generation FAPI specifications that are enabling faster time to market for Open RAN solutions.
Radisys continued to deliver new solutions that enable service providers and enterprises to deliver new services. We launched our Engage Virtual Assistant (EVA), the world’s first AI-powered video, voice and text enabled bot. At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw an increased need for customer service innovation as wait times were untenable. EVA empowers customer support, sales and marketing teams to significantly enhance the customer experience by delivering greater personalization that drives customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction with the cost savings of automation.
Natasha Tamaskar, VP & Head ofBusiness Strategy &
Global Marketing,
Radisys
For broadband service providers, we introduced our Connect Open Broadband, a carrier-grade, Tier 1 network-hardened, scalable and secure software-defined Passive Optical Network (PON) distribution based on open standards and web-scale architecture to drive rapid innovation and economies of scale. We recently followed this announcement of an open broadband solutions with the unveiling of our Reach Smart Home solution which enables broadband service providers to offer their customers safety and security in their home by connecting all smart appliances, sensors and controllers through an open device ecosystem, while simultaneously managing costs and streamlining operations.
MWC 2021 was different than previous MWCs, it still provided an opportunity for the industry to connect, learn and showcase the newest solutions. While Radisys opted to participate virtually this year, we are proud to participate. This event not only demonstrated the perseverance of the telecom industry, but it also celebrated our industry’s commitment to driving innovation and expanding the telecoms ecosystem.
What's your showcase theme this year, and what are the key technologies you will be exhibiting/discussing?
Our 2021 showcase theme is “Open Telecom.” As a global leader in open telecom solutions, we are committed to enabling service providers to transform into digital experience providers through our open and disaggregated platforms and solutions.
During the show, we announced our partnership with COMSovereign to connect Open RAN-based 5G with edge computing to meet our customers’ performance and latency requirements. Radisys’ Connect 5G RAN software portfolio is enabling the integration and commercialization of COMSovereign’s 5G RAN, Core and MEC-based products and solutions for a wide range of applications including autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, smart cities, power grids, automated manufacturing and robotics, and remote/telemedicine. Radisys’ Connect 5G software suite, combined with COMSovereign’s MEC solution, will provide customers with a single, fully integrated solution with the economies of a cloud-native edge computation.
Our long-time partner Qualcomm announced at MWC its second generation 5G RAN Platform for small cells and the industry’s first 3GPP Release 16 5G Open RAN platform. Qualcomm’s FSM platform integrates our small cell software from LTE to 5G for both mmWave and sub-6 GHz bands where we demonstrated 1Gbps+ throughput.
During MWC, we also shared that Radisys is partnering with QCT and Intel to enable open 5G networks by providing open, disaggregated and virtualized RAN solutions. Radisys’ market-first Release 16 5G Software stack is powering QCT’s OmniRAN. OmniRAN is Open RAN based and has been successfully deployed in smart manufacturing use cases. It enables mobile operators and enterprises to benefit from reduced costs, improved network efficiencies and faster time to market enabled by open APIs and open architectures.
What's your outlook for telecoms for the rest of 2021?
If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we never truly know what is coming around the bend. However, we have also learned that the telecom industry is more than capable of surmounting massive obstacles and finding ways to address these challenges swiftly and efficiently. I am optimistic that the rest of the year will be filled with innovative products and solutions that aim to improve the lives of customers and will lead to promising future endeavors in this industry. I expect to see a convergence of wireline and wireless connections, in order to best support the hybrid lifestyles that have been born out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fight to bridge the digital divide continues as well, with service providers moving from the access hardware to the cloud to meet the needs of their growing networks.
Along with expanding broadband access, the telecom industry is embracing the growth of digital engagement solutions. As a result of the pandemic changing how we work, learn and live, digital engagement has become a prominent field in need of immersive media applications to support the influx of users. While the industry will forever continue to grow and change, telecom will adapt and develops solutions to address the needs of the future.
