Wind River , a global leader in intelligent distributed cloud software , is in the vanguard of businesses driving the digital transformation of missioncritical systems .

One of the areas where the company is helping usher customers into a new era is telecommunications .

“ We ’ re constantly strategizing operations for the future ,” says Paul Miller , CTO , Wind River .“ 5G and virtualized radio access networks ( vRAN ) are laying the groundwork for applications such as autonomous vehicle control , drone control , and software-based factory automation .”

Looking even further ahead , he predicts that service providers will offer “ a fully virtualized environment , from core to edge ,” adding that this will be automated “ and built on cloud-oriented architecture .”

An important area for Wind River in telecom is its work with Open Telco and Open RAN ( O-RAN ) deployments .

O-RAN is a key enabler for organizations from many sectors to provide a wide array of new services to their customers . It ’ s an enabler of edge connectivity and the machine economy , and it provides the foundation for use cases such as autonomous driving , modern energy grids , and robotics .

Wind River is continually innovating and has leveraged its strategic OREX partnership to share these innovations with the ecosystem .

For example , recent projects include a multi-vendor Open vRAN demonstration with OREX members NTT DOCOMO , Fujitsu , and NVIDIA that showed how an Open RAN system can be energy efficient .

But as well as enabling opportunities , new technologies also bring challenges , most of which concern system integration . OREX helps ease these challenges with activities such as the Open RAN verification environment and the work done recently to define new methods for system integration .

“ Distributed networks are complex , so Open RAN solutions must mitigate complexity ,” says Miller . “ Our focus is on providing ease of deployment , increased levels of automation , and operational efficiency so service providers can better support new 5G use cases .”