Shirin Esfandiari

An Interview with Shirin Esfandiari, Senior Director Product Marketing at Oracle

An Interview with Shirin Esfandiari, Senior Director Product Marketing at Oracle.
October 2022, London

Ahead of Network X at Network X this October, we got the chance to catch up with Shirin ahead of Oracle's participation at Network X.

Network X is just a short time away, what will Oracle be looking to share at the event?

We will be focusing on innovation at the speed of the cloud. 5G was conceived as a cloud-native technology, and done right, it can deliver revenue growth. We will share our journey on how we’ve helped operators adopt next generation IT/cloud operating practices and best-in-class, multivendor solutions to maximize the benefits of 5G, cloud nativity, and the full 5G ecosystem.

Service providers today are able to invest in a host of cloud and network-based technologies, what advice would you give to them in terms of prioritisation of investments?

Firstly, telcos should focus on building 5G with the objective to support massive scale industrial IoT. This implies building networks that are capable enough, flexible enough, and efficient enough to support a vast array of very different services – from small scale to hyperscale – and build an organization around it that can react at lightspeed to deploy new capabilities for opportunities as they arise.
When we talk about the value added, the functionality the differentiation, the majority of the use cases that everyone likes to talk about and that bring revenue, they happen at the core of the network! And the core presents somewhat of a minimal portion of the investment because the rest of the investment is in the RAN --- this largely always been there but the difference in 5G w/r to 4G and 3G is that for the first time we are counting on the core and building something above and beyond just the normal mobile broadband --- Therefore investing in a best of breed core technology is critical in 5G success.

Secondly, CSP’s deploying and operating 5G networks should consider the impact that analytics can have on their return on investment. From the early stages of planning and design, analytics plays a role in understanding the performance of the network and identifying critical problem areas or gaps. By leveraging analytics in the early stages carriers can prioritize the locations and define the parameters for deployment with the most potential to generate revenue. This enables providers to be more purposeful with their resources, minimizing the risk of deploying expensive network assets in an inopportune region.

How do you see future cooperation and competition between hyperscalers and Service Providers? Where will there by synergies and conflicts?

Providers should look to hyperscalers and the open-source community and the presets around big data and machine learning as a resource for tooling and services, as well as disciplines and practices.

Where there can be synergies with hyperscalers such as Oracle:

Oracle’s industry specific expertise and decades of cloud experience is helping operators not only scale and adapt for 5G services, but also monetize and fulfill new offerings rapidly, and help them migrate to the cloud. Oracle’s deep vertical expertise across 17 industry sectors empowers operators to address industry specialization, at a global scale and in the cloud.
Oracle having the scale, the depth, and the expertise to understand the challenges across all these different verticals and fulfill their needs in the marketplace helps operators compete and lead by opening doors to new revenue generating business models.

Are you able to tell us a success story with a Service Provider that you have recently worked – what was their ROI after digital technology investments?

Dish Wireless sought a technology partner to help deploy a 5G network completely built on innovation – with the goal of creating a cloud native network that could rapidly scale and adapt to emerging industry-specific 5G use cases.
With the rapid progression of 5G deployment expected to reach 4.7 billion global 5G connections by 2026, Dish was challenged to design, and deploy a network that could scale to this volume. To build the nation’s first cloud native, OpenRAN-based 5G network, Dish selected Oracle to leverage a cloud native, service-based architecture for its greenfield 5G network deployment. With Oracle technology, Dish aimed to provide enterprise customers with added control of the software and services they utilize, taking advantage of their individual “network slice.”

Using Oracle service-based architecture, Dish is capable of supporting enterprise digital transformation journeys across an array of industries. The agility of Oracle SBA enables Dish network services to be rapidly incorporated into new applications by Dish or Dish customers through automated, intelligent configurations between network functions. It also streamlines policy management for different applications and industry-vertical business models such as manufacturing or telehealth.

By using Oracle’s cloud native network function to automate their network, Dish has enabled their customers across industries to incorporate new applications and scale to meet the expected growth of 5G subscribers and connected devices. Dish’s 5G network is capable of supporting use cases such as enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency communication, mobile IoT, and user equipment policies.
As communications are quickly becoming a critical component for future innovation, many enterprises are seeking full access to their data, and control over their network. And they want to consume such services with the ease and simplicity of consuming anything else on the cloud today – through a marketplace. With their cloud native, best-of-breed, and hyper distributed cloud edge network, Dish is not only providing virtual private clouds to their customers, but an engine for creating new services. The ‘design like’ environment is envisaged to be a front end for the enterprises to configure and consume different capabilities from Dish as they build their services. This bold vision embodies their goal to be different from other operators whose main currency is typically connectivity.

Today, Dish is co-innovating and co-creating value with broader digital ecosystems, including providing support for automation of processes and exposing insights to their partners to enhance their business decisions. Not only does this approach create significant cost benefits for Dish, but being software defined means they create new customer products and services much faster than the traditional development cycle, enabling them to deliver innovation at the commercial and marketing level where they can develop, test, and deploy new ideas quickly, fail fast, and try again with something new.

Finally, what are you most looking forward to at Network X?

Looking forward to really engage with the customer and analyst community.