In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we look at the recent high impact telco cloud, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and APIs moves. The major cloud, edge, and API developments include the progress of Azure Private MEC in supporting manufacturer private 5G network implementations, VMware Telco Cloud Platform Release 4.0 using a horizontal infrastructure approach to ease VNF and CNF deployment and administration, VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN assisting the optimization of disaggregated RAN functions and CNF management, as well as how the Vonage Singtel partnership is uplifting network, edge, and communications API prospects.
Our analytical review focused on:
Azure Private MEC Proving Manufacturing Prowess. Microsoft Azure private MEC targets the streamlining and acceleration of private 5G (P5G) networks on the Azure cloud platform by providing a fully managed solution that can allow, for example, manufacturers to deploy and operate their own P5G networks with full control over their data and applications. We delve into how Azure private MEC and its ecosystem partners are helping manufacturers use 5G for improved outcomes with Pegatron, an electronics manufacturer of laptops, smartphones, and gaming consoles, creating its own private 5G network to cover its entire factory and Weavix, through the company’s Internet of Workers platform, is equipping front line workers with wearable technologies and solutions to improve performance and safety.
VMware Ups Telco Cloud Proposition. VMware Telco Cloud Platform Release 4.0 focuses on solidifying numerous capabilities into a unified platform that can give telcos the flexibility to modernize their network according to their business objectives particularly through the implementation of requisite automation and assurance capabilities. We discuss how the rigors of designing and managing services combined with the intricacies of coordinating virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) demands a horizontal infrastructure that can support the deployment and administration of VNFs and CNFs with consistency, efficiency, and automation.
VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN Underlines Disaggregation Benefits. VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN delivers a horizontal platform optimized for running virtualized baseband functions or virtualized distributed units (vDUs) and virtualized central units (vCUs) from various vendors while meeting the stringent performance and latency requirements of a radio access network (RAN). The use of a horizontally consistent architecture that supports cloud-native principles can cultivate the build-out of logical end-to-end networks tailored to different 5G services. We explore why disaggregated RAN functions can be instantiated on a horizontal platform and deployed at the locations that best serve their functional purposes. Plus, how CNFs can be managed efficiently at scale and readily modified to turn business objectives into productive outcomes.
Vonage and Singtel Uplift API Prospects. Vonage, part of Ericsson, is partnering with Singtel to integrate Vonage’s API platform with Singtel’s orchestration platform Paragon with the goal of bolstering innovation opportunities for enterprises and telcos through access to a global ecosystem of communications, network, and edge APIs. Paragon-enabled telcos from Singapore, Thailand, Spain, Taiwan, and Indonesia will be able to integrate Vonage and Paragon APIs into a globally unified telco and edge API library as well as worldwide independent software vendors (ISVs), enterprises and developers can look to use the APIs to deliver digital services at greater speed and scale over hybrid networks, hybrid edge, and public cloud infrastructures across multiple markets. We assess why this partnership can be a harbinger to answering why this time is looking different when it comes to APIs playing an integral role in driving innovation and major benefits, such as 5G service monetization and energy efficiency gains, across telco environments.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello and welcome everyone to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group, and I’m joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Tom Hollingsworth, the networking nerd and event lead at Tech Field Day here at The Futurum Group. And today we will naturally be focusing on the major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye and that includes, for example, some new developments in the cloud area as well as an update really on network APIs. And with that, Tom, welcome back. It’s great to see you. This is in effect like a trilogy installment for us.
Tom Hollingsworth: It is, and I’ve been really busy since the last time I was on, so we’re really getting the Mobility Field Day event tied together. We just announced that we’re going to be hearing from companies like Ubiquiti and a new one, Eno, who’s doing some AI based planning in the space. So it’s going to be exciting times, but luckily I was able to break away for a few minutes and jump on here with you so we could talk about some of the exciting things going on on your side of the fence.
Ron Westfall: Well, hey, it’s fully appreciated and yes, the twain are meeting. I’m certainly excited about the upcoming Mobility Tech Field Day and thanks for that update. So this is definitely a scoop for the folks out there. And as a reminder, this is taking place May 15th through 16th, and yes, we have an all-star lineup, including the new additions that Tom alluded to. And with that, let’s basically continue on the same theme, Mobility ecosystem and what is going on. And we’re looking at basically the challenge of deploying and administering private 5G networks as well as Edge computing. I think we all understand this is not a simple task. As such, it typically requires high levels of expertise, security, and flexibility. Plus it has to integrate with the existing IT systems and processes. So that is a whole lot just to address.
To actually meet these challenges, Microsoft developed Azure private MEC, which is a solution designed to streamline and accelerate the deployment of private 5G networks on the Azure cloud platform. Now, Azure private MEC or MEC can provide a fully managed platform that can allow, for example, manufacturers to deploy and operate their own private 5G networks across the mobile Edge computing realm. And that includes full control over their data and application. So I think that’s going to be increasingly important, is giving them that peace of mind, the confidence that their data will just remain that, their data, and that by using a private 5G implementation with whatever else is already deployed, including wifi for example, there won’t be any compromises when it comes to security. Now with that set up, let’s delve into two examples of where we’re seeing Azure private MEC and its ecosystem partners helping manufacturers specifically to use 5G for basically advancing their business outcomes.
Now one is Pegatron, which is an electronics manufacturer that produces products such as laptops, smartphones, and gaming consoles. Something that’s fun to all of us here. And as such, Pegatron is using Azure private MEC to accelerate its digital transformation and enhance basically its competitiveness. And how’s that? Well, by deploying the Azure private MEC, I find that Pegatron is creating its own private 5G network that covers its entire factory, thus enabling high speed and low latency connectivity for its own devices and machines. Now, this is enabling Pegatron to use Edge computing to run data intensive and time sensitive applications on the factory floor itself, such as quality inspection, predictive maintenance and inventory management. Things we’ve been hearing about for a while now are actually becoming real. And in addition to that is WeaveX, which is equipping its frontline workers with wearable technologies and solutions to improve performance. How do they’re doing that? Well, they’re using what they call the walt Smart Radio, which is being used by every frontline worker that has complete access to each other as a result, as well as their office teams and basically the community of workers that they have to work with across other parts of the globe.
Now the company’s Internet of Workers platform helps to reduce downtime, expand enterprise-wide collaboration, naturally improve efficiency as well as safety measures that can basically just make that possibility real, that is have a workforce that is improving its productivity, but also the overall experience, i.e., happier workers. Now by using Azure private MEC, WeaveX is providing low latency and high reliability communication that is well, quite simply scalable but also secure when it comes to that Edge data processing and storage. And as a result, I see that Azure private MEC also allows internet workers to integrate with other Azure services. So it’s not just this one specific solution, but it has to clearly interwork with other capabilities such as Azure IoT Hub, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, as well as the existing IT and OT implementations that are already in place. And so with that, Tom, what are your key takeaways from the Azure private MEC proposition as well as what’s going on with overall private mobile Edge trends?
Tom Hollingsworth: I like where Microsoft is headed with this because one of the things that a lot of people have to understand about what we would consider to be the enterprise is that it’s not always an office. I talked to a great company this week that uses the term uncarpeted enterprise to describe what they’re doing. And when you think about a manufacturing floor, that is the perfect example of what would be considered a mission-critical application to a business, but yet it doesn’t have pretty LED lights, it doesn’t have these beautiful carpet fibers. In fact, usually everything’s covered in a thin layer of dust. It’s also a very hostile RF environment. And one of the things that you need to understand about that is this is the perfect deployment scenario for something like a private 5G radio network because it gives you wide coverage, but it also makes it so that you can deploy these boxes to these large facilities.
And one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand is these milling machines and these operational machines, a lot of them still run on some very old technology. I’ve heard all the way back to something like ArcNet because once that machine has been certified to operate, it can’t be adjusted. It has to be re-certified in order to be adjusted after the fact. So by putting these devices in front of those as it were, not only do you provide connectivity back to a cloud and to other cloud services that you can offer, but you also gain the ability to run things on that Edge compute cluster, which allows you to do things like collecting analytics and being able to provide up-to-the-minute feedback on things. I mean, how many times have we heard the amount of processing that these systems can do, hundreds of units per minute? But if you needed to say, okay, well how many of these units rejected bad work in the last three hours?
We don’t know. We just know that it rejects bad work and we run those stats at the end of the day. By having some kind of an Edge compute device in the middle, you can then batch those statistics and upload them up to some kind of a cloud application that can give you up to the second information, “Hey, we are seeing a higher than normal amount of bad work being processed from this particular line.” We need to go investigate what’s going on so that we’re not costing ourselves a lot of extra goods in processing things that aren’t going to be able to work. And Microsoft is hitting on this key that all of these enterprises are connected now, these are no longer islands of machines that work, and it takes a lot of glue to tie them together above that level. If you can integrate these Edge computing devices and pull those pieces together where they interface into the network, you can leverage a lot of services that people are very familiar with.
Ron Westfall: And I think it’s clearly a positive that they have two real world customers who are implementing this. So we’re getting past, what about conversations to, okay, what are some of the specific challenges that are going to have to be fulfilled in order to make this work on a optimal level? And I like the ArcNet example, if I’m not mistaken, there’s still casinos that use it for their one-armed bandits for the slot machines. So I think that’s a wonderful way of looking at, yes, this new technology has to interoperate and interwork with existing implementations in order for that enterprise to really sign on and then start thinking about, okay, how can I evolve the overall implementation to take advantage of new capabilities such as predictive maintenance that you touched on, Tom. And I think this is all really demonstrating that the 5G ecosystem is maturing, that one of the key barriers that we have seen is that it was just the availability of, for example, 5G technology as well as mobile Edge computing capabilities.
That was really a barrier for many of the large enterprises. And this is a demonstration that, okay, that will increasingly become less of an issue and it’ll become more of the practical implementation items that will be getting more top priority. And so thanks for those excellent insights. And now let’s turn to recent moves by another, well partner yet competitor of Microsoft Azure, and that’s VMware or better known as VMware by Broadcom these days as they successfully completed that acquisition. And what I’m looking at is that the VMware telco cloud platform release 4.0 came out recently, and I’m seeing it raising the competitive stakes really across what can be characterized as the telco cloud realm. And why is that? Well, this release is solidifying numerous capabilities into a unified platform. So this is going to be a common theme here that can potentially give telcos the flexibility to modernize their network according to their business objectives as well as tap into those automation and assurance capabilities that are well basically essential.
And as we see it, the rigors of designing and managing services that combine the complexity of coordinating virtual network functions or VNFs along with cloud native network functions or CNFs, really demands a horizontal infrastructure approach that supports basically the deploying, the running and managing of both the VNFs and the CNFs with consistency, efficiency, and automation. Now to streamline the process of adoption and modernization, VMware by Broadcom is simplifying how customers can implement and deploy the VMware telco products themselves. And this is beginning with this new version 4.0 of VMware Telco Cloud Platform that has two packages, that is the VMware Telco Cloud Platform Essentials, as well as the VMware Telco Cloud Platform Advanced Package. So it’s pretty intuitive how they work. And as a quick summary, the VMware Telco Cloud Platform Essentials gives the decision makers really a way to implement this and a fast, easy approach to deploy the infrastructure and manage the solution.
It’s basically a run and gun type of proposition, but we know it’s going to vary and we know it’s going to require some support in some scenarios. But the good news here is that VMware is giving this option out there. Now, if you have more advanced needs, well ta-da, there’s the VMware Telco Cloud Platform Advanced Package that includes the automation capabilities and the Essentials package, but also adds things like network slicing, multi cloud support and network function automations such as the VNFs and the CNFs that I already touched on. And this, I believe, can furnish a competitive automation and orchestration solution for core telecommunications network, something that is clearly in demand and is certainly being, I think, elevated in terms of its channel possibilities. And so with that, what are your thoughts, Tom, on the new VMware Telco Cloud Platform release 4.0 and its implications for the industry, certainly for the rest of this year?
Tom Hollingsworth: Ron, it reminds me of when Avaya was trying to jump on the bandwagon of getting as many of these things of their old phone systems, their Norstar systems that they had acquired from Nortel to be SIP enabled. Well, those devices are never going to be able to be upgraded. They’re never going to be able to work effectively with that technology. So what they did is they created a middle layer, they created a server that included all of the advanced functions that you could possibly hope for to be able to interface with that old equipment because it was a whole lot cheaper to sell the middle box than it was to convince a company to rip out their existing infrastructure and replace it. And I see VMware by Broadcom doing that exact same thing here with this technology because a lot of these companies, they’re looking at what it might take to get to more of an upgraded solution in the future, but for now, they don’t have that capability.
Telling an organization they have to go and rip out a whole bunch of hardware is a pretty quick way to convince them not to buy anything from you. But by creating this telco cloud platform, what they’re effectively saying is, we can help you by building something that allows you to interface with that old equipment, but to be able to automate it, to be able to orchestrate it, to be able to manage it more effectively and to get a little bit more life out of it while you’re trying to gain more functionality into it. And when you familiarize yourself with the interface that VMware uses, well then when it’s time to pull some of that equipment out and replace it, why don’t you just go with the thing that you already know already.
So I see this as a double-edged or a double-pronged attack, if you will. They’re creating a middleware glue layer, if you will, to be able to squeeze a little bit more life out of this equipment, but they’re also creating some kind of an interface so that the users who are familiar with it will be more likely to go with that solution in the future. And I think that this is a valuable tool from VMware, especially now that they’re owned by Broadcom because by making it sticky, Broadcom can continue to get that recurring revenue from their subscription-based models, and that’s really going to make their investors happy.
Ron Westfall: And I think it’ll also make customers happy, channel partners happy. And yes, there has been some criticism out there, but I think when it comes to this certainly area, this is going to prove just that, beneficial for all parties. And I like the emphasis on not propositioning a telco with you got to rip out hardware in order to make the solution work. This is reinforcing the theme that we touched on at the beginning. That is these solutions have to inter-work and interoperate with the existing implementation. And I think this is definitely a way that VMware is really meeting that fundamental proposition. Yes, there are greenfield exceptions, there might be some other exceptions, but that’s that. Those are the exceptions. The vast majority of the telecom market at least is going to be how are you going to fit into my implementation? And I think that’s just so well understood and that’s why this release 4.0 is so welcomed and is actually meeting those types of demands.
And with that, wait, there’s more. VMware is also proposing in addition to the release 4.0 that disaggregated RAN functions are going to be required to really substantiate on a horizontal platform that can be deployed at the locations that best serve their functional purposes. So again, it’s giving the operator that deployment flexibility, the implementation agility. And by also including cloud-native network functions or CNFs as we define them, can be managed efficiently at scale and need to be quite simply manipulated to turn business objectives into those productive outcomes we’ve been talking about. Now I discern that a horizontal platform can make disaggregation and operational reality.
Why? Well, the use of a horizontally consistent architecture that supports cloud-native principles can cultivate the construction of logical end-to-end networks that quite simply are going to meet different 5G service demands. And to that end VMware telco platform RAN can deliver a horizontal platform optimized for running virtualized baseband functions or virtualized distributed units or VDUs, which a common term in the telco industry as well as the virtualized central units or VCUs from various vendors. So again, the multivendor aspect here is basically table stakes while also naturally meeting the usual stringent performance and latency requirements of radio access networks. And so from your view, Tom, how is VMware further augmenting its overall telco cloud proposition? What about it that’s jumping out and why does aggregated RAN is needed to really make a difference when it comes to telco operational flexibility?
Tom Hollingsworth: So everything I said about their platform in the previous story applies here, but there’s that extra added wrinkle when you throw the RAN thing into it because as we’ve learned over the years, RAN based stations have completely different functionality based on where they’re located. A RAN based station in a city is going to look very different from a user profile perspective, from an application perspective than a rural RAN based station. In say some kind of a metropolitan area, you can have distributed functions in different areas and if you get, say for example, during a sporting event when people will tend to aggregate in one side of the city, you can distribute that load a little bit. But in a rural area, that thing has to do a lot more heavy lifting because the users on that base station are so geographically dispersed. And I think what VMware is effectively saying is what we’re trying to do is build a platform that allows you to add pieces to those puzzles, if you will.
And in a more dense environment, we can use these platforms to augment each other when we need to distribute load, when we need to add application support. But when you get to an area where you have a much more distributed user base and your units seem to be a little bit beefier in order to handle the fact that that tower might be serving thousands of subscribers without any kind of reliable backup, by making that a horizontally scalable platform, you’re getting the consistency of what they offer, but also the capability to build as you go so that you don’t have to worry about it. And I remember this from my old days working in a reseller environment, you open that closet door to that base station virtually, if you will, you never know what you’re going to find in there. Oh, great, we can’t do the thing we were planning because this equipment’s too old to handle that.
As these devices become more commoditized, as they become more reliant on commercial off-the-shelf hardware, the layers of software above that are the things that are doing the heavy lifting in order to really help people understand how these things are supposed to work. And again, VMware is building this out. They’re providing the interface layer between the hardware and what the customer demand is, effectively. And by creating that and by it easy for people to use, what they’re doing is they’re making people want to stick with VMware by Broadcom, which I mean ultimately is every company’s goal. We want you to continue to use our stuff, but they’re also building a platform that allows to build capability in the future because that’s the other thing that companies really want to avoid.
They don’t want to buy a one-and-done kind of solution for this. We’re going to stick this in for a couple of years, it’s going to get us to the next revision, but then we have to throw it all away. VMware’s messaging on this is much different. It’s saying right now you need this interface layer, but in the future that interface layer can be transformed into a much more robust software solution and that’s going to carry you into the future so that you don’t have to rip us out when you’re getting rid of the equipment, when it finally reaches its end of life date.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, those are excellent points. And yes, it is about that deployment versatility. We all know like small cell densification for example, is going to be much different in an urban environment than suburban or rural implementations. And it just doesn’t end there, there’s the antennas, there’s the spectrum allocation, there’s just so many different factors that feed into, okay, how can we optimize really the RAN implementation to meet all of these different technical and business objectives? And there might be a bit of good news here on the horizon how this can be helped. Regardless of the RAN implementation, whether it’s a traditional RAN implementation, a virtual RAN implementation, a cloud RAN implementation that is using open RAN principles as an example. And that is network APIs, which has been a very popular topic in Q1, including naturally Mobile World Congress 2024 after our friend AI. So I had to give out a little honorable mention to AI before we conclude our conversation.
But the reason is that Vonage, which is now part of Ericsson for a while now, is partnering with Singtel to integrate Vonage API platform with Singtel’s orchestration platform, which is called Paragon, to boost these innovation opportunities for enterprises as well as the telcos to access a global ecosystem of communications network and Edge APIs. So it’s not just about network APIs per se, but also Edge and communications APIs. Sometimes they overlap, but I think there is warrant for demarcating these different types of APIs because they’re all going to make a difference with what? Well, let’s look at Paragon itself. Now. Paragon enabled telcos include Singapore, naturally, Thailand, Spain, Taiwan and Indonesia, and as such, they’re going to be looking to integrate the Vonage and Paragon APIs into a unified telco and Edge API library. Now, this leads into allowing software vendors, enterprises, and developers, and this is the part that I’m emphasizing, to look at and use the APIs to not only deliver digital services at better speed and scale over what are basically hybrid networks now, but also the hybrid Edge and public cloud infrastructure across these different geos, across these different verticals, basically across any market that is being targeted.
Now, to preface this, I talked about how can this help with the RAN implementations? Well, certainly one I think use case has gotten a fair amount of emphasis is the energy efficiency aspect. Through network APIs, there’s potential for the telcos and whoever else is being impacted to figure out how can we do that. Again, distribution of energy to make sure that the telco itself is certainly meeting its sustainability goals, its ESG objectives and so forth, but also to just that, lower the bill, but without cutting off the service for like E911 and other vital services. So it’s a balancing act, but this is where third-party developer innovation can play an increasingly important role. Now, this is not new to the industry, network APIs. After all, we’ve seen similar initiatives in the past such as REST and SOP that sought broader API adoption and the Telco Roam, however, those results were decidedly mixed or perhaps somewhat modest. But with that, Tom, how are you seeing this develop? How are seeing network APIs coming on board and this time it’s different perhaps. Now what’s going to be different and what are the prospects here these days?
Tom Hollingsworth: When you look at the way that people consume communication services now, this is not Ma Bell’s good old-fashioned pick up the phone and get a dial tone. They are looking for advanced services. I mean, when’s the last time you went out and bought an answering machine? The answer is probably you haven’t. I mean, even if you have a dedicated landline service, you probably have voicemail that’s being offered by either the company that you’re with or by some other kind of partner company. 911 is a perfectly good example too. I mean it is a requirement in the US that you have to provide 911 services to people. Well, how are you doing that exactly, and how does an upgraded phone system do that? I spent a lot of my time working with telcos trying to figure this out back in my reseller days and it’s a difficult proposition to crack whenever you’re dealing with modern public safety answering points and things like that, unless you have some kind of an API interface into that. So by creating an API interface down at the user layer, something that Vonage can do, you’re opening up the world to all of these kinds of services that you can resell.
Voicemail is obviously the biggest one. But what about call filtering? I mean, Lord knows that people who still have landlines are probably the ones who get the majority of the spam callers or the scams or even things that you may not want, like political surveys and things like that. So as a service, as someone who maybe wants to talk to Vonage or even somebody who’s leveraging them like Singtel or any of these other telcos, I can offer that service for a small monthly fee and oh, well, yeah, I’ll subscribe to this and then I won’t get these calls and things like that. Again, only possible because of the API interface because if you look back to the way that these things had to be implemented before, they don’t play well when there’s no way for these systems to talk to each other. And so I think what you’re going to see is these VoIP companies who are continuing to drive innovation are going to continue to offer these API integration solutions so that developers on the cutting edge of that technology can provide the kinds of services that make people want to keep their landline.
Because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot over the years here recently is people are just shutting them off. I mean, they don’t need them. They carry a mobile device almost all of the time. Why would I even bother? And it’s actually causing a lot of companies to look at whether or not they even want to keep those services or whether they need to divest them into some other kind of vehicle so that it doesn’t affect their bottom line. Because as nice as it is to be able to have that recurring revenue, if you can’t spruce it up and make people want to buy it, then it becomes a yoke around your neck that you’re going to have to carry because if they have a landline, there are certain services that have to be mandated for it. So I think that this is a way to offer a way for telcos to provide the kind of services that are going to want to make people continue to use those landlines and augment their existing mobile device footprint.
Ron Westfall: And I think those are all solid points, Tom. And I think one thing that also has to happen, and Vonage is putting priority in this, and this came out of conversations at Mobile Global Congress, is that it’s making the network API experience itself more friendly. Now that is basically reducing some of the overhead that has come up with just trying to use the API that is going to get these developers incentivized to want to work with this network, to want to provide some new capabilities. But how many people have their business identification codes available when they’re trying to sign on? It’s not readily available in many cases, and that could be a hindrance. So something as basic as that, that can be a difference maker. It’s about the blocking and tackling of making the network API experience itself just that, more developer friendly, more third party friendly.
And I think that’s going to help answer the question, what’s different this time? And there’s other factors in play. Naturally, 5G stand alone will become increasingly prevalent during the course of 2024, and that I think will also make the 5G core capabilities all that more programmable and accessible and so forth. And so this is coming together to make, again, 5G services more attractive potentially, and again, allow the telcos to really monetize on a broader scale and on a more diverse scale. Okay, and so with that positive note, thank you again Tom for joining the 5G Factor. Certainly looking forward to our next 5G Factor and of course Mobility Tech Field Day a few weeks from now.
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, thanks Ron, and I’m really looking forward to it as well. And we’re going to have a great time. You’ll be there. A lot of other great people will be there, so make sure you tune in at techfieldday.com on the 15th and 16th of May.
Ron Westfall: Thumbs up. Exactly. I know I literally will be. With that, thank you to our viewing audience for joining us. Again, we appreciate taking the time out and don’t forget to bookmark us, naturally, in terms of remembering 5G Factor. It’s basically a once a week type of proposition. And with that, thank you everyone and have a happy 5G cloud and network API day.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
5G Factor: Signs of 5G Turnaround?
5G Factor: Key MWC24 Takeaways – The Cloud and Telcos
5G Factor: Making AI Open, Responsible, and Transparent
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
