Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, you are watching TelecomTV. I'm Guy Daniels. Now CSPs are under increasing pressure to modernize their core network and IT infrastructure. And joining me now to explain how they can ensure a smooth and accelerated transition to a more flexible cloud native core and IT stack is Darrell Jordan-Smith, who's the Chief Revenue Officer for Wind River. Hello, Darrell. It's really good to see you again. Now Wind River is well known for its leadership in Open Ran and the Edge, and we've covered that a lot on previous TelecomTV programs. But how does this same expertise extend to CORE and IT infrastructure? And also why should CSPs be focusing on this now?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (00:52):
Well, it's a great question and thank you for inviting me to talk with you today. Essentially the CSPs are looking to derive benefits from driving what they see in terms of the radio access network and what we deliver at Wind River. As you are well aware, as you mentioned, well known for deploying radio access networks in open ran, virtual ran and traditional RAN based environments. And we deliver that over our operator cloud infrastructure, Wind River Operator Cloud Platform, and we deliver that to a very high degree of availability five and six 9s. So carrier grade always on availability. Now a lot of our customers are now asking us can they run the same applications they have in IT and in the core on the same infrastructure? And the answer is yes, and we're now beginning to do that for a number of our customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:54):
So given these requirements, what are the biggest challenges that CSPs face in modernizing their core and IT infrastructure and how does Wind River's approach help to overcome them?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (02:05):
Well, our approach overcomes a lot of the customer's concerns because the automation that we bring to bear as part of our Wind River operator cloud infrastructure platform, we have a technology called Conductor, which leverages AI that enables you to automate the deployment of not just our infrastructure, but the migration of workloads from their existing infrastructure into a newer platform. So that's the first thing. The second thing really is our platform runs VMs in OpenStack an open source project as well as CNFs in a Kubernetes container-based platform supported on a contiguous open source platform with a project that's known in the open source community as styling X. So we have a very modern platform that's very proven, hardened to carry a grade with a long life cycle that addresses some of those concerns that the carriers actually have the CSPs actually have in terms of migrating from a particular vendor today to someone newer tomorrow. In addition to that, what we're seeing is a lot of our customers wanting both open source technology, but they also want choice. And our technology integrates that well with that of what they've already deployed. So we're not talking about a revolutionary approach, but an evolutionary approach in the migrations at the speed and velocity that our customers want, that they're comfortable with in certain customers. They want to move very quickly because they want to move quickly from one infrastructure to the other and we're actually enabling that.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:37):
And Darrell, can you share some real world examples of CSPs who are successfully deploying Wind River's solutions in the core and and what impact it's had on their operations?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (03:49):
Well, we are working with an operator. I'll give one example here in the United States where I'm actually based called Boost, formerly known as part of Dish, but Boost Mobile here in the United States are migrating over 28,000 of their radio access nodes to Wind River Operator Cloud Platform. They're also moving a lot of their IT and their telco core application sets to run on our platform as well. Their core application is actually a sort of a hybrid core core that runs in both AWS's environment. So we are hybrid in that nature in terms of collaborating with AWS, but a lot of the load balancing and other core IT centric applications that run it around Core are running on Wind River Cloud Platform. And what's really interesting for us, we're in the middle of that migration from that traditional vendor to Wind River, and we're doing that in a matter of weeks, not years. As you can imagine, traditionally doing 28,000 nodes would take some time, and we're doing that in record time. We're doing that in less than three months.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:02):
That's an interesting example there from Boost. Darrell, have they articulated any of the benefits they've had from this approach?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (05:10):
Well, absolutely. That's a very good question and thanks for asking that. I think the key benefits for Boost, certainly from our perspective is in three different areas, and I'm sure that they will articulate something very similar. The first area is they migrate to our Wind River Cloud platform and benefit from the long life cycle that we operate within. So we deliver a much longer life cycle with our technology than their traditional vendor does and has done in the past. So they have predictability sustainability in what they're actually deploying into their network that has long-term TCO benefits and cost benefits. So that's the first one. The second one is the speed of migration and the risk that we diminish by moving quickly. Again, moving 28,000 from one vendor to our platform is a very big task in a short timeframe. So we mitigate a lot of that risk by moving quickly and driving that synergy for them. The third one is around the cost synergies of having a common platform. They can use Wind River's operator, our cloud platform, not just for the ran, but also in the IT functions and their core as well. So they can actually run all of those applications over a common infrastructure and derive synergies and better TCO over a long term with that solution.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:39):
That's great to hear. Well, a final question for you Darrell, and as I mentioned earlier, CSPs are under increasing pressure to modernize quickly. So how does Wind River enable a smooth transition, a fast transition to a more flexible and a cloud native core and IT stack?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (06:58):
Well, we operate our stack using two core technologies. One is based on OpenStack that runs on our platform. We have Kubernetes that runs on our platform. Our platform is open source source's based on the styling X project, and we've built automation tools in and around that leverage ai. So we're able to automate a lot of the migration and execute consistently to a high degree of quality in a secure environment, that complete environment. So we're actually doing that today actually, as with the example I just mentioned with Boost Mobile.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:35):
Excellent. Well, we must leave it there for now, Darrell, thank you very much for talking with us again and for sharing your views with us today.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (07:43):
Thank you very much.