The battle for Open RAN may be taking its final and most useful form. HPE is entering the space, and with a suite of elements that promises to reduce the integration burden associated with Open RAN and other open-model networking technologies. Since Mavenir announced a partnership with Red Hat in the same general area, it’s pretty clear that we’re moving from point-element competition in the space to systemic solution competition. That’s critical for the success of Open RAN overall, but it also comes with some risks.
My talks with operators this year have illustrated three basic truths about their infrastructure budgets. First, with the exception of 5G in general and RAN in particular, no significant infrastructure spending is budgeted. Second, the preference of operators, by approaching a 3:1 margin, is for an open solution. That’s particularly true with Open RAN views. Finally, operators are increasingly disinterested in (or even disenchanted with) integrating a couple dozen vendors into an open-model 5G network.
These three truths play out in a kind of “mindset sandbox” that’s evolved over a couple of years. Operators have generally accepted that hosted functionality is going to be critical going forward, not the least in 5G where it’s actually mandated. The question is how the hosting is done. One approach, the traditional one for 5G, is function hosting in a server-based resource pool. The other, which has been gaining significant traction, is the white-box hosting model.
What operators have always liked about white-box networks is that they’re a special case of “box networks”, which is what they’ve built all along. You can put white boxes everywhere from (in theory) a cell site to the core. They can be managed almost exactly like traditional boxes in each of these locations. You can probably evolve to white boxes more easily because you can do point substitutions for obsolete gear in your current network. Finally, white boxes separate the capital hardware and the functional software. Operators rightly believe that it’s software that will evolve, so they believe that having an open software model means they can repurpose hardware, making hardware (and capital) lock-in less risky.
What they don’t like about white boxes is that they see less economy of scale. Hosted functions in edge-and-deeper server farms is almost surely more capital-efficient. Not only that, these servers can also host things other than traditional network functions, which means they might serve in helping operators climb the service value chain (when and if they shake off their fear of ‘higher-layer”).
The mixing of the three operator issues and our two sandbox frameworks appears to have shaken out three vendor approaches to 5G. The first is the “software-on-whatever” approach, taken by VMware and most recently the Mavenir/Red Hat alliance. This approach says that 5G is all about the software; anything consenting adults want to run it on is fine as long as it’s basically compatible hardware. The second is the “mission” approach, which says that what you want is a package that includes both hardware and software and focuses on a specific network mission. The final one is the “pre-integrated” approach, and that seems to be what HPE is after.
All of these, of course, are being touted by someone other than the mainstream network equipment vendors, whose embrace of open-model networking could fairly be described as halfhearted and a bit cynical. Unfortunately, all the vendors who do support an open-model approach are novices in selling network infrastructure to network operators. In particular, these vendors have all fallen into the IBM trap of focusing on sales engagement to drive their entire campaign, doing little or nothing in the way of marketing and positioning to grease the skids. That’s bad because it puts the sales organization in the position of doing all the legwork, spending time that isn’t generating sales and commissions. It’s no wonder that these vendors have all had issues with their sales so far. Even now, it seems pretty clear that the current vendor initiatives in the open-model network space are being driven by the hope that buyers are getting more determined, not that their own efforts are getting smarter or better.
Well, maybe HPE will be different. They do have some assets (or possible assets) in the space. In fact, they have four, and we’ll look briefly at each.
Asset number one is that they actually have a very complete telco solution. HPE has always supported NFV, always supported OSS/BSS integration, and they supported an open 5G core model even before their just-announced Open RAN strategy. That means that they could provide all the relevant pieces of a 5G infrastructure, both hardware and software, and they integrate it and take support responsibility for it. That is a major asset according to operators.
The second asset is that they use edge computing to address white-box native granularity. To quote the HPE material I link to above, this is a “Carrier-grade ruggedized NEBS Level 3 and GR 3108-compliant platform — Designed for the far edge.” The same technology HPE promotes for edge computing and IoT is available for carrier edge applications in 5G. There is significant benefit in the notion of generalizing 5G edge to “IoT edge”, given that there’s a lot of scale to be obtained in the latter mission.
The third of the HPE assets is partner programs supporting development of higher-level applications. HPE has long had an NFV program to solicit and certify VNFs. They have similar capabilities in the IoT space, and so they know how to do partner programs and leverage them without losing sales or support control.
Finally, HPE has the mass to promise full support for 5G advanced features, including network slicing, both within the RAN and through their open-model 5G Core. Operators have cited a fear of being left behind as a major barrier to Open RAN, and they accept HPE’s long-standing telecom commitment (via NFV) and its sheer size as an assurance that HPE will keep up with the network equipment vendors.
All this is encouraging for HPE, but not decisive. Every public cloud provider is working to get in on the 5G opportunity, even before it’s really clear just what that opportunity is. Software-side players like Red Hat and VMware have jumped in too, and of course there are white-box-based initiatives for 5G being produced by individual vendors and integrated by others. HPE, in the face of all of this, has fairly dismal marketing/positioning. The only thing that’s saving them from another NFV-like debacle (NFV never delivered much for HPE) is that competitors really aren’t doing much/any better.
I asked about three dozen operator infrastructure planners to draw me a “complete” 5G open-model network. None of them drew exactly what AT&T proposes to sell, or reproduced a diagram that matches the HPE website material. Nearly all of them did one of two things—ceded 5G user plane entirely to legacy technology, excepting the UP elements that terminated 5G interfaces, or advocated some role for white-box elements. Nobody hosted everything, and if you want to sell an architecture your buyers don’t have any inherent appreciation of, you’d better be singing and dancing like a son-of-a-gun to get mindshare, and quickly.
The big opportunity for players like HPE is the operators’ desire to get a complete 5G solution from a single, responsible, player. That “complete” qualifier ties to those diagrams I asked for, and if the buyers themselves can’t draw a picture of their goal, it follows that a vendor/integrator has to either draw a credible one for them, or wait a long time for the opportunity to develop. I wonder if there’s a long time to wait. The 5G network giants are all moving to embrace something more open, and they’re surely able to provide something “complete” already. All the open-model integrator-wanna-be’s are going to be watching developments and trying their own drawing skills. Somebody might just get lucky.
HPE and other major players in the Open RAN space who believe they can capitalize on the integration interest of buyers should keep this point in mind. Open RAN is a piece of a network, not the whole network, and operators need to build the network and not pieces. Even when you add a new element, an almost-autonomous piece, to a network, you have to consider the whole and not just the part. That’s part of the marketing reality of network transformation…if you remember that you have to do marketing.