Verizon Business is looking to partner with system integrators to develop 5G enterprise applications in India. 

In an exclusive interaction, Verizon Business Chief Revenue Officer, Sowmyanarayan Sampath told BusinessLine, “As 5G proliferates, Indian system integrators and Indian IT companies all want to build their value stack and develop their 5G practices.” The American communications giant is in talks with Indian system integrators to build products and applications using Verizon’s mobile edge computing platform. 

Verizon’s mobile edge platform, called the 5G Edge, allows for cloud computing facilities or IT services to come at the edge of any mobile network. Typically, when enterprises use facilities such as cloud computing, the cloud servers could be in a different city or in a different State entirely. By bringing these applications to the edge of a network, customers, or enterprises can carry out computation locally, reducing latency and increasing throughput and bandwidth significantly. Real-life use cases for the same can be autonomous cars, usage in oil and manufacturing operations, manufacturing, data analytics and computation in hospitals etc. 

“The magic of 5G is that it is mostly a B2B technology, and it will require a lot of new products. So we have started partnering with system integrators in India to say hey,you build a practice on Verizon’s 5G mobile edge computing, and you bring and put application on top of our base infrastructure,” Sampath said. Sampath estimates the total addressable market of 5G applications to be around $20-30 billion dollars.

Sampath said, “It is still very early days, Indian system integrators have gotten into this before other players, there is lot of opportunity, and they have a lot of choices, we want us to be the primary partner for them.” 

Vectors of growth

Sampath describes Verizon Business to have three vectors of growth in the Asia Pacific, which are- cyber security, networks as a service, and private 5G networks. In October 2020, Verizon launched a private 5G platform for enterprises located in Europe and the Asia Pacific region, partnering with Finnish Network Giant, Nokia to provide private 5G wireless networks solutions for enterprises. Nokia is going to be the sole partner for Verizon Business for private 5G networks in India

“Our private 5G is delivered in partnership with Nokia and the offering will enable Indian businesses to deploy a private industrial-grade dedicated 5G network capability within their premises. We will work with Indian MNCs on deploying private 5G. We won’t be involved in any spectrum acquisition,” Sampath said.

Reacting to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s diktat on private networks, Sampath said, “Our overall thesis on the spectrum is that we want more spectrum to be allocated for services and we don’t want to lock down the spectrum in a few hands. That is our policy stand globally on how it goes.”

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