Mavenir held its annual analyst event this week and highlighted some important information highlighting its progress in transitioning to a maturing ecosystem player in the telecom equipment industry. The company highlighted its recent Koch Brothers $500M investment; existing investors include Intel/Nvidia and Siris Capital, who remain majority equity holders. The company highlighted that it grew revenues and bookings in the mid 20’s percent year-over-year in its Fiscal 2020, an impressive figure. Two main themes came from the show. First, the company’s RAN portfolio is picking up steam. Second, the company’s portfolio now spans very wide, from telecom core to RAN.
The RAN portfolio has made significant progress. The company claims over 20 deployments in 14 countries. And, Mavenir has demonstrated the capability to deploy on AWS, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and VMWare. The company spent a great deal of time reviewing definitions of various Open RAN terminology, to address confusion, spanning from vRAN, O-RAN, C-RAN, Cloud-RAN, and Open vRAN. We’ve seen many public statements from Mavenir, its competitors, operators and pundits, alike, espousing the various benefits of some or all of these systems. We think the point Mavenir was making at its conference is that Open vRAN is the most open, interoperable system. When operators enable open systems, of course, it allows Mavenir and other vendors to bid on deals for networks that have existing equipment from traditional vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE. We see Mavenir’s efforts to work with various infrastructure companies and systems like AWS and VMWare as a means of gaining a foothold with operators who are trialing or in the early stages of deploying these various infrastructure systems. Speaking of partners, the company claims it has relationships with nearly 15 Remote Radio Unit (RRU) players. The company says it can deliver Massive MIMO capabilities to customers, which means that its RAN systems can satisfy what would be considered mainstream 5G use-cases; this represents very significant progress over last year’s RAN capabilities.
Mavenir’s portfolio is extensive. The company made separate presentations about the following topics: RAN, OSS, Radio, Packet Core, Mobile Core, BSS/Digital Enablement, Security, Private Networks, and Enterprise over three days. With over 5,000 employees spanning the globe, exposure to the most relevant parts of the mobile infrastructure industry, Mavenir is a serious contender for deals. The company also highlighted that its telecom core technology uses modern programming techniques that enable it to operate on cloud infrastructure; among these are fully containerized micro-services design. The company shared that most microservices file sizes are under 25 Mbytes, evidence that the systems are designed as microservices (and can load fast).
The fact that in April 2021, well-known Koch Bros made a $500M “strategic minority” equity investment in the company is an important validation of Mavenir’s place in the telecommunications industry. We see the investment as a reinforcement of the company’s balance sheet and an opening to new customers.