OpenRAN to be a big part of Indian telcos’ network strategy: VMware’s Shekar Ayyar

In an interaction with ET’s Danish Khan, Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president, general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud, VMware said Indian telecom operators are looking to become full-fledged end-to-end providers. He said that Indian telcos will adopt OpenRAN technology along with their global counterparts. Edited excerpts

What are your views on OpenRAN?

The transformation that is taking place, in particular with OpenRAN, is going to be the next big wave of virtualization that hasn’t touched the telco landscape for so long. Telcos have an architecture and an infrastructure that was hardware-defined and was a close system, and there was no real opportunity for software to be a defining part of that architecture. As a result, it was difficult for operators to create new services quickly. Then over the past three or four years through NFV and telco cloud we’ve cloudified the core of that network. But, access and radio access have been the untouched portions of that architecture.