In order to develop 5G enterprise apps in India, Verizon Business is looking to work with system integrators.

“As 5G proliferates, Indian system integrators and Indian IT companies all want to build their value stack and develop their 5G practices,” Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Verizon Business Chief Revenue Officer, said in an exclusive conference. Verizon is in talks with Indian system integrators to develop products and apps based on the company’s mobile edge computing platform.

Verizon’s 5G Edge mobile edge platform allows cloud computing or IT services to be deployed at the edge of any mobile network. Typically, when companies use cloud computing services, the cloud servers are located in a separate location or even a different state.

Customers or companies can do computation locally by bringing these apps to the network’s edge, greatly reducing latency and improving throughput and bandwidth. Autonomous cars, used in oil and manufacturing operations, manufacturing, data analytics and computation in hospitals, and so on are examples of real-world applications.

“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 the 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 are a lot of opportunities, and they have a lot of choices, we want us to be the primary partner for them.”

Vectors of growth

In the Asia Pacific, as per Sampath, Verizon Business has three growth vectors: cyber security, networks as a service, and private 5G networks. Verizon introduced a private 5G platform for businesses in Europe and the Asia Pacific area in October 2020, collaborating with Nokia, a Finnish network giant, to deliver private 5G wireless network solutions for businesses. In India, Nokia will be Verizon Business’s sole partner for private 5G networks.

“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.”