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We attended the Mavenir analyst meeting last week. The company has made progress in developing its radio products, while at the same time it has grown revenues approximately 15% this year and bookings are estimated to reach $510M this year. The company expects to achieve a 28% EBITDA margin this year, greater than last year’s profitability rate. The company has 3,100 full time employees, up significantly from last year. We met executives hired recently with impressive pedigrees. The company is positioning itself as a US based end-to-end mobile network operator supplier.
In 2019, most of the company’s revenues are from the telecom core products. Generally, the company is taking a software-only approach to the mobile network market, which in many ways is what operators want from its suppliers. By taking a software-only approach, the company leaves some of its destiny in the hands of others, especially when it comes to hardware acceleration and radio units. The company has achieved success in VoLTE and RCS. It is using the growing brand it has developed in these telecom core services areas to get access to RAN projects. The company describes its RAN activities and its partner’s radio capabilities as being able to handle radio connection densities on the order of 200 users per radio. Mavenir plans to bring User Plane Forwarding capabilities for packet core to market next year with hardware acceleration; chip suppliers that were mentioned include Intel and Mellanox (now Nvidia). The company is investigating various acceleration techniques such as GPU, ARM and FPGA, which presumably will allow the company to provide a denser baseband system than is currently possible. The company is targeting mobile operators that are making initial deployments of O-RAN based radio systems. Mavenir explained that European RFIs are allocating a certain number of RAN sites to O-RAN. The company claims to have recently been awarded some O-RAN contracts that have limited deployment scenarios. Vodafone CEO made public statements in support of working with Mavenir recently.
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At Mavenir’s analyst meeting in Dallas today, the company stated that it expects to grow its revenues about 10% Y/Y in 2018. In arriving at this revenue, it is pursuing a price-aggressor strategy to some extent and has a surprisingly broad portfolio of telecom-focused products. Its product line is software-oriented, though the company does still have hardware development on an ongoing basis. Using 5G as its ‘insertion point,’ the company is working on a strategy to get 10-15 large, Tier 1 mobile network operators at the tens-of-millions per year level. The company’s portfolio encompasses voice core, messaging core, mobile packet core and radio access networks. What is really interesting is that Mavenir expects to expand past its traditional revenue stream (telecom core and messaging) into the radio market, with revenues coming in 2019.
In its traditional telecom core market, the company suggested that some of its customer wins are with Tier 1 mobile network operators across its product portfolio, including IMS/VoLTE, EPC/5GCore, Security and advertising messaging. To illustrate its success in selling a differentiated Telecom Core portfolio, it shared subscriber statistics that its operator customers who use Mavenir core system such as IMS TAS, CSCF and RCS application servers (mostly supporting VoLTE, and secondarily RCS):
In its new market, RAN, this is exciting – Mavenir is a new entrant to the RAN market, and it is US-based. The company expects that it will have Radio Access Network (RAN) revenue in 2019 after successful completion of trials now underway. For reference, the company’s RAN systems generally follow open standards such as xRAN and can be considered “cloud RAN.” Ericsson and Cisco representatives provided an upbeat presentation about the corporate partnership, offered some customer success metrics and discussed some new initiatives. The teams held back from providing concrete measures of progress such as revenues. Our judgement is that since each is continuing to make joint offerings, the relationship is moving ahead.
Customer engagement progress was characterized at 100+ deals and 300+ engagements. It is interesting to figure out what each of the two parties deliver to customers. The way the two companies characterize what each is good at and what each delivers to customers is quite similar to the way it was characterized at the previous year's MWC 2016 presentation - with one possible exception: Each of the spokespersons said that customers are using the Ericsson wireless packet core (Cisco also sells wireless packet core). Roles and Responsibilities. Generally, the teams still see the roles and responsibilities split up as follows:
Given how strategic the NFV landscape is for the future of the telecom industry, we were interested in each company's participation in NFV Orchestration. The partners say the way they split up the orchestration between each other would typically be as follows: Cisco's NSO is used typically in managing the network and resources (Cisco claims it wins big here). Ericsson's transport-oriented NFV is typically used. And then Ericsson's orchestration system manages both Cisco's and Ericsson's lower level management systems. Some wins discussed:
As we explained earlier, the partners discussed new three initiatives discussed for the future:
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CHRIS DePUY
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