Mavenir CEO Pardeep Kohli (pictured) disputed industry speculation its mobile core business was facing difficulties.

A new report by Dell’Oro Group stated the top-five mobile core vendors in Q2 2023 were Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Cisco, with the latter replacing Mavenir in the fifth spot.

The report led Light Reading to state Mavenir’s mobile core business had hit “the skids” in a headline.

Kohli noted Mavenir’s omission from Dell’Oro Group’s top-five was due to the research company’s decision to combine the wireless and wireline core sub-markets, but Mavenir doesn’t compete in the pure wireline sector.

According to Mavenir’s boss, research director for Dell’Oro Group and author of the report Dave Bolan told him it stopped reporting the split between wireline and wireless last year. But “if we did break out the data for the wireless market, Mavenir would be in the top-five vendor rankings,” Kohli quoted Bolan stating in a blog.

“Even without the report, I believe everyone in the industry knows that there are only five vendors [Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Nokia and Mavenir] who can provide all wireless core network (Packet core + IMS) components at scale,” Kohli noted.

He stated the company has never built or sold proprietary hardware for mobile core, but in the past it has sold off-the shelf hardware, OpenStack, and its software as a system.

“Over the last three years, we have encouraged our customers to buy infrastructure (hardware plus CaaS) on private cloud or public cloud directly and we only provide software,” he wrote. “With this approach, our revenue number is pure software/services revenue with minimal third-party components.”

Kohli further stated the open RAN vendor has added more than 50 new customers over the past three years, which he said was only possible because of its move to a disaggregated model.

He noted the company’s software-only revenue increased in 2023 when compared to 2020 but didn’t provide data.

“I encourage all the analysts and journalists to change and think what the future of the telecom is going to be and not what it is today,” he wrote.

In a separate recent report, Dell’Oro Group stated open RAN and virtualised RAN revenue declined in Q2 2023, which marked the first quarter of year-over-year contractions since it started tracking them in 2019.