VMware has been making a lot of Open RAN announcements, and that’s important. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the whole open-model network approach. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the Open RAN movement and the impact that might have on telecom infrastructure. The real story, though, is that all Open RAN successes don’t have equal potential in creating a seismic shift in the market, and that depends on just how a given strategy leverages those two “demonstrates”.
Open RAN has three essential dimensions. First, it’s a software model for how to make the 5G RAN more open than 3GPP specs alone would allow. That limits the influence that the giant mobile-network players have on the market. Second, it defines an open model for function hosting, a contender for the next generation of NFV. Finally, it potentially defines the launch point for a general edge computing vision. From a market impact perspective, it would be ideal to address all three of these dimensions in an implementation.
Whether that happens depends in large part on just who is proposing that implementation. We’ve all seen, over the last decade in particular, that vendors do the stuff that boosts their own financials, not the thing that advances the market overall. That’s not a bad, nor an unexpected, thing. However, it means that a given vendor is likely to work to maximize only those of the three essential Open RAN dimensions suit their own business needs. The narrower those needs, the less the chance a vendor will cover the market-wide bases.
We also have vendor categories to match with our three dimensions, then. One category is the network vendor, another is the IT vendor, and the third is the cloud vendor. Network vendors are very likely to focus on the first of our three Open RAN dimensions, excluding the others. IT vendors are likely to focus primarily on the second dimension, with perhaps a nod to the other two. It’s the cloud vendors, which include both cloud providers and cloud platform software providers, that have the most overlap between their own business goals and the three dimensions of Open RAN.
VMware is one of those third-category vendors. They’ve been very active in the Open RAN space, but they’re also a major player in cloud platform software, and because they’ve cultivated relationships with public cloud providers as well as server players, they have a foot in the door of the hosting dimension. One particular thing seems to define the VMware position in our three dimensions, its role in the Open Grid Alliance.
The Open Grid Alliance or OGA was established by VMware and Vapor IO in April of last year. It bills itself as “the next step in the evolution of the Internet”, which is a claim a lot of technologies make these days, including Web3. If the claim is common enough to be almost trite, the pathway to fulfilling it is not. What the OGA is working on is a model of distributed processing, creating what’s essentially a global compute fabric created by uniting compute resources in the cloud, online, and elsewhere.
The term “grid” may be a bit overloaded here. Originally, grid computing was a structure to create a parallel-processing model for applications that can be divided into what are essentially independent processes that do something unique, but is then combined to become parts of some over-arching and glorious goal. The primary applications are more statistical and scientific. OGA is taking the step of broadening the notion of a grid to envelope any mission for cooperative, distributed, processing on the one hand, but also the notion that this new “grid” has to be able to support any number of separate applications as well.
The reason OGA is important to our assessment of VMware and Open RAN is that it would characterize Open RAN elements as simply applications of the grid. Things like IoT and the metaverse would also be applications of the grid, so the aim here is to create a platform that can host all of the emerging online application elements. By framing Open RAN in what’s a broad distributed/cooperative computing model, the OGA approach covers all three dimensions of Open RAN impact. It also takes a mighty technical and market bite.
If OGA really aspires to define a new model for the Internet, a model that’s based as much (or even more) on cooperative computing than on networking, it’s attacking a mission that may well be unequaled in size anywhere in tech today. It’s a mission that overlaps with everything in computing, the cloud, and online services, and a number of other new initiatives like Google’s Nephio, blockchain, Web3, and the metaverse. I’m not for a moment suggesting that a broad technical scope isn’t a major asset in terms of addressing the future evolution of all these areas, only that it approaches and perhaps passes the “boiling the ocean” threshold.
This need to address a very broad scope may be why there’s little information on just what OGA proposes, other than good intentions. From the intentions, it seems like OGA is targeting more the relationship between compute elements deployed in a grid model, than on how to do the deployment. That would make it a higher-level attack on edge computing than Nephio proposes, but just how high a level is being addressed or how it would work isn’t covered yet.
The broad scope also puts the OGA approach in collision with a lot of major players. VMware is the second-largest company in the OGA (Deutsche Telekom is the largest). Dell, who’s had an obvious relationship with VMware, is another large member, but none of the other server or software giants are involved, nor are any of the major network vendors or cloud providers. The fact that there’s not a herd of telecom players in the OGA is perhaps the biggest challenge, because without broad telco support it will be difficult to promote broader vendor participation.
VMware’s advantage here is that they’re in what may be the best position to address these issues. Their cloud and virtualization software suite is as good as or better than anything else in the industry. They have a very strong Open RAN position, taken by a quality telecom industry group within the company. They have, as I’ve noted, relationships with the public cloud providers and also with server vendors. They’re largely network-vendor-agnostic, though their SD-WAN stuff collides with similar offerings by players like Cisco. The telcos know them and respect their products.
The revolutionary potential of my three dimensions lies in getting them all under one roof, technology-wise at least. Since VMware is the technology heart of OGA, they can control whether that’s accomplished simply by what they field, what they do, on their own. Getting others to cooperate would make things even better, but it’s not essential. This is VMware’s game to win, or lose, and to me that means that VMware needs to step up and drive the OGA to offer more than glitzy promises.
There’s always a “but”, it seems, and there is one here. It’s the all-too-common issue of marketing and positioning. I can sell a tree much more easily than I can sell a forest; that’s an easy point to get agreement on. It’s also true that I can market the tree more easily. The value proposition is easier to explain in no small part because the properties of and applications for a tree are easy to describe. The forest situation is another matter completely. Like many tech companies, VMware has struggled to position its stuff to people with real budget authority. That’s fine if you’re selling something to technical types, but that will be true only when the need for the class of product is widely accepted and it’s only a matter of selecting the supplier. Grids don’t fit into that; there will have to be a solid strategy to position the concept, and do so relative to all three of our dimensions of Open RAN.
The good news for both VMware and the OGA is that the marketing and positioning will be at least as difficult for anyone else as for VMware and the OGA, and possibly even harder. The OGA has both at technical and market lead on the issues, and even though the positioning of both VMware and the OGA could and should have been stronger from the first, strength is relative and everyone else is even weaker. However, this isn’t going to last forever. There are not only risks that others (Red Hat comes to mind, as does HPE) who might jump out and do something arresting, but also risks that the multi-dimensional approach itself could be contaminated by the “death of a thousand components”. If the broad mission is fragmented by piece-part implementations that are highly credible, the value of the broad approach is reduced.