Nokia has acquired Juniper Networks’ RIC and SMO technology and team. Juniper Networks’ Group Vice President of 5G and Telco Cloud, Constantine Polychronopoulos, said on LinkedIn that the team – and he – will be heading over to join Nokia’s network management division, starting today, 1 October.
Juniper based its RIC technology on technology and people it licensed and hired in 2021 from Netsia, a Turk Telecom company. Since then it has updated on several occasions on progress in lab and field trials, as well as in O-RAN Slugfests for its rApp (non real time) and xApp (near real time) platform. It included Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone among trial customers, working with RAN partners such as Parallel Wireless and with Casa Systems. There has been less publicly available information over the past 18 months to two years.
The company was then acquired by HPE, which has obviously taken the decision that the SMO-RIC business is not worth continuing with. That mirrors a decision taken by Broadcom to dispense with VMWare’s RIC development. (Just as an aside, Constantine Polychronopoulos was VP and CTO of the Telco & Edge Computing division at VMware until he joined Juniper in 2020.)
So Nokia now has the Juniper RIC assets – although it is unlikely that it would look to put aside any element of its own SMO and RIC capability, which sit in its Manta Ray network management system. Juniper had built some integrations and partnerships, but had few commercial customers so revenues would have been low to zero, meaning that a purchase price was probably valued in terms of IP and people.
Juniper will be bringing a good deal of automation expertise into the business as the team that Polychronopoulos has assembled transfers over, and that may be the prime consideration for Nokia. It has also integrated with a number of different rApps and xApps, and although Nokia has steered away from its initial focus on the near real time platform, it will still be interested in the sort of tight time loop automations that Juniper’s team has been working on.
In terms of the market, it is clear that the drivers for an independent RIC platform are lessening – and Juniper’s exit takes another independent RIC provider off the market. In recent months, where RAN vendors have won contracts, even ones that are labelled Open RAN compliant, they have tended also to win the network management platform, meaning the SMO and RIC, in an open architecture. That’s been the case at AT&T and at Telus, for example, where the prime RAN vendors Ericsson and Samsung have both supplied the network management platform as SMO-RIC. Verizon has gone about things a slightly different way, transferring its C-SON platform from Cellwize into Qualcomm’s Dragonwave RIC, following Qualcomm’s acquisition of Cellwize.
Nokia’s acquisition, then, solves a problem for Juniper in giving its technology team a home, and it gives Nokia more capabilities in its own network automation division.
TMN has asked Nokia for comment on its plans for the integration of the Juniper SMO-RIC assets and will update accordingly.
