In case you don’t know what it is, Cellwize is a self optimizing network software company. With its first SON beta customers in 2013 and five more customers in 2014, they boast seven operator wins at this point. That’s impressive for such a young company, and RCR Wireless News spoke to its CEO, Ofir Zemer, about the company’s history and priorities for 2015.
Cellwize said its solution supports 2G, 3G and 4G technologies, as well as all of the major hardware vendors in the radio access network market, ensuring that when an operator works with Cellwize’s SON product it can actually optimize the entire network. In October 2014, Cellwize announced work with Telefónica UK in support of their network modernization project. Using the elastic-SON product to manage the transition from the old to the new network across three RAN vendors was a key accomplishment for this young organization. During the modernization program the network was optimized to ensure consistent performance between the networks while the equipment was being transitioned.
Another application highlighted during our discussion is the use of SON to ensure “Internet of Things” performance while optimizing end-user performance via value-driven SON. Most of today’s IoT devices can be supported with a 2G infrastructure, but there are also actual end users still on these networks, causing congestion that results in neither the people nor the machines receiving adequate performance. Cellwize shared a case study in which the actual end-user traffic was shifted to 3G and 4G networks to allow IoT traffic priority on the 2G network, resulting in improved experiences all around. In the future, priority could be given to different IoT devices depending upon their geography, applications, services or the customer.
This type of functionality allows for the transition from network engineering sales discussions to marketing and sales enablement trusted-partner discussions. By being able to help operators define and launch prioritized services based on value-driven SON, Cellwize is able to connect with the operators at both a technical- and business-level discussion.
SON on NFV-SDN is another product in the portfolio. Running on Windows- or Linux-virtualized machines, the network function virtualization and software-defined networking product can support functions directly in the operator’s private cloud. If operators aren’t currently deploying completely software-based functionality at this point, the software can also work on hardware from traditional RAN partners. Working with these partners, the vision for the future is a virtualized cloud RAN with SON functionality throughout.
The virtualized world is coming, admittedly faster in some geographies than others, but Cellwize is working with some of the key industry players to help continue the momentum throughout 2015. I’m looking forward to hearing more about their solutions throughout the year.
Ofir Zemer joined Cellwize in 2013 as the CEO, bringing over 20 years of high-level software and systems experience with some of the largest telecom groups in the world. Prior to Cellwize, he co-founded the software company Pontis and partnered with some of the leading vendors and system integrators in the telecom space, such as: Accenture, Cap Gemini, Amdocs (NYSE:DOX), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and SAS. He has served as the GM of the instant communication division at Comverse Technology as well as the VP of marketing for the messaging division. Zemer graduated from INSEAD business school with distinction in the MBA program and holds a B.A. in economics and law from Tel-Aviv University.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
