Rise of Private 5G and “Netflix”-type of 5G services. The cloudification of 5G will introduce new operating platforms and players to the wireless network space, says, Hariprasad G, Head of Silicon Engineering and India Country Manager, EdgeQ.
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Q1. What’s the USP of EdgeQ? Tell Us About Your Business Model?
EdgeQ’s vision is to reconstitute 5G in a manner that is intuitive, simple, and consumable for our customers. We want to remove the friction that stands in the way of 5G adoption and consumption. To fulfil this vision, we offer 5G in a model that is fully programmable, configurable, and cloud-driven for the next trillion of “users.”
Our approach is to replace traditional monolithic, closed, rip-and-replace cellular deployment with an agile, software-defined, cloud-managed model. By uniquely coupling software programmability with an innovative subscription-based business model, we enable customers to select features of 5G services that best reflect the level of user support, coverage, bandwidth, and network services. It is a pay-as-you-go model with low entry barriers for customers. This is unprecedented not only in 5G but in the history of semiconductors.
Q2. What Are Your Top Markets/geographies for Business? Tell Us About the Market Opportunities You’re Currently Pursuing?
I see EdgeQ bridging the digital divide for the billions of cellphone users and the next trillion of intelligence devices. To that end, our vision is to bring internet access across all geographies.
We work globally with major market leaders in the wireless infrastructure space, responsible for digital transformation. These include telco operators, hyperscale cloud customers, network service providers, and traditional equipment makers. Enterprise, telco and cloud providers can use EdgeQ to deploy private 5G networks, virtualise 5G network resources, or elastically scale 5G services on demand for both macro base stations and small cell access points.
Q3. On the Product/innovation Front, What Are Your Key Focus Areas? How Are Your Innovations Helping Telecom Providers/carriers as Well as End-Users?
EdgeQ focuses on enhancing wireless infrastructure to become more intelligent, agile, and cloud-native. We want to lower the barrier to entry and deployment of 5G. Our approach converges 5G and AI and unifies hardware and software in an open and programmable manner. Through designing the world’s first software-defined 5G Base Station-on-a-Chip, we enable new customers, new players and new providers to deploy 5G in a massive and differentiated manner. All with complete flexibility. Customers, for the first time, are able to access the 5G algorithms via APIs to enable targeted customisation and value-added services.
Q4. Since When Is EdgeQ Present in India? How Important Is India for EdgeQ – From a Talent as Well as Market/sales Perspective?
Our large Bengaluru Design Center has been a critical entity of EdgeQ since our company’s inception. Much of the brain trust responsible for the SoC design and development of our 5G Base Station-on-a-Chip is driven by the engineering leadership here in India. We are very fortunate to have been able to build such an exceptional design team in our Bengaluru office. Every member of this team is incredibly talented and has contributed to launching some of the most revolutionary, market-shaping technologies in the world: such as 5G, Wi-Fi, WiMax. Many of them are graduates from top universities in India. We hope to continue to grow our engineering talent at our Bengaluru design center.
Equally, we see some unique market dynamics in India relative to 5G. There is a tremendous opportunity. We anticipate a leapfrog strategy where telco carriers will be motivated to leverage Open-RAN to accelerate 5G deployment. But rather than relying on traditional suppliers and approaches, the India carriers will look to a more open ecosystem driven by innovations that enable smaller, lighter, cheaper cells at the edge. EdgeQ is uniquely positioned for this seismic shift.
Q5. Why Did You Choose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Vis-À-Vis Other Cloud Providers? Please Outline Specifics of the Quantitative Business Benefits You’ve Gained (Or Expect to Gain) by Using OCI?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) best enables us to execute our 5G vision. OCI provides us customer-centric services, uncompromising performance, and a friendly business model. Moving to a cloud-based design enabled EdgeQ to parse and deconstruct our complex chip design into malleable bits. It allowed us to parallelise our design and integrate back in a seamless fashion. This is all necessary as we can operate as a unified organisation while executing to a very tight runway with constrained resources.
Moving to OCI has helped us gain great performance at 50% less costs than before. It has also brought us immeasurable benefits of locality, breadth of technology, and reduced duplication of data per server. This all allows a global organisation like EdgeQ to easily synthesise a complex design across our numerous design teams.
Q6. What’s Your Business Expansion/growth Plans for the Next 12 Months?
2022 promises to be an exciting year for us. We have already begun sampling, but we expect customers playing instrumental roles in the enterprise, telco and cloud fields to start deploying next-generation 5G wireless infrastructure premised on software programmability and customisation.
Q7. What Innovations Are You Focusing on to Support This Business Growth Plans?
There are three major tectonic shifts that fuel my optimism for the 5G industry.
a) Convergence of 5G + AI at the edge where IoT intersects with Cloud: Unlike previous treatments, 5G and AI will become synonymous and inseparable in terms of their value point and services to users and customers.
b) Digital Transformation in enterprises (smart factories, smart cities, tele-operations) driving greater cloud and compute consumption: Private 5G networks will drive novel use cases and environments that will require a convergence of wireless connectivity, AI, and networking.
c) New content and new data sourced by new users/devices, driving new content delivery platforms: Rise of Private 5G and “Netflix”-type of 5G services. The cloudification of 5G will introduce new operating platforms and players to the wireless network space.
And we at EdgeQ are looking forward to actively participate in all 3 of these megatrends.
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