Sudhansu Dora has over two decades of experience in the telecom industry. He has over the years worked with companies such as LogicaCMG, Nokia and Xura (erstwhile Acision) in various capacities. He is currently director, technology, at Mavenir and is responsible for strategy, business development and solutions for cloud-based voice core, packet core and Open RAN technologies across the South Asia region.
He believes that while telco consolidation in the Indian market has made the space more competitive for network equipment and solution providers, it has brought opportunities too. “Operators are now investing in cloudification of their networks to leverage new technologies such as IoT and 5G. This offers opportunities to provide 4G solutions on cloud-native applications on COTS hardware that can also be used in 5G,” he notes.
Talking about emerging industry trends, Dora observes that operators are consolidating their infrastructure from bare metal-based deployments to NFV. “First steps are being taken with independent private cloud environments at various locations. Once these systems become functional, centralised orchestrators are expected to be deployed. Telcos are also exploring common cloud set-ups in those distributed deployments to merge packet core and IMS core solutions.” Besides the cloud, telcos are working on Open RAN technology.
For Dora, his most memorable assignment remains the time at Mavenir when his team helped a Tier 1 operator test the voice and data core network on the public cloud. “The objective was to verify the feasibility of telco grade solutions on the public cloud – and the telco wanted to do it within 30 days. This was quite challenging, but through our collaborative efforts both the packet core and the VoLTE solution were deployed and tested within a span of three weeks. Hosting a telco’s core solutions on the public cloud was a first of its kind in the entire industry,” he says.
Dora is an electronics and telecommunication engineer from VSSUT, Odisha. He also has a PGDM in information systems from IMTCDL. In his spare time, he likes to read about new and upcoming technologies and gadgets. He also likes to play badminton to de-stress himself. His family includes his wife Sunita and their two schoolgoing children. “Sunita is a homemaker and a teacher for the entire family,” he says. Dora belongs to Odisha and his parents continue to live there. His father, a retired electrical engineer, too is a technology enthusiast.
