​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):

• North America >70M active subscribers, 62% VoLTE share
• EMEA >25M active subscribers, 50% VoLTE share UK/Fr/Germany
• APAC >45M subs; 67% RCS share Central/S.Asia

​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:

• Cisco does "IP," generally and specifically cited routing and WiFi
• Ericsson does Radio Access and provides professional services, OSS/BSS and typically serves as the Systems Integrator
• Cisco sees this partnership as a means to target emerging markets.  This is because Ericsson has significant market presence in emerging markets.
• Working on smaller deals up front, then if the relationship works, will pursue bigger sized deals.

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:

• 3 Italy
• C&W
• Aster Dominican Republic
• Vodafone PT
• Evolved WiFi networks in Africa
• Next Generation Network - Middle East
• W transformation.  Vodafone Hutchinson AU
• IP Transformation - Telefonica Latam

As we explained earlier, the partners discussed new three initiatives discussed for the future:

• Collaboration Mobile Convergence mobile phone used as enterprise device). UC, presence, messaging from Cisco using its Spark offering and Telco TAS delivering VoLTE from ERIC.  CMC is intended to allow mobile phones to be useful communications devices for enterprise users.  In this case, users will make VoLTE calls using the regular dialer of the phone and can use collaboration capabilities using the Cisco Spark application.  Avail late 2017.  There is a press release with more detail.
• WiFi/Small Cell joint offering.  Uses Ericsson small cell and Cisco WiFi.  Together, these systems allow traffic steering.  
• Managed security from Cisco.  Orchestrated by Ericsson.