 Hi everyone, good evening. Welcome to the first session for Agile India 2021, the light edition. Very excited to have Nagalakshmi with us, who will talk us through strategy of product development. So with that, Nagalakshmi, over to you. Hello everyone, welcome to the session on strategy to product deployment. Product development for new technology areas, wherein we're going to be talking about in case study. So my name is Nagalakshmi and I am a senior engineering technical program manager at Cisco. So in every product development initiative, product design planning and program management should be at the centre as it is the foundation and driving force for the success of a product. It's even more crucial when entering a new market space with evolving technologies like 5G for example. When building products, there are typically multiple teams across the organisation and sometimes external vendors involved as well. If there's no well defined structured process, there's a high risk of not meeting the desired results for the product success. At Cisco, we are building the internet for the future. We believe in building sustainable, world-class products that enable our customers to grow their revenue, reduce their operating costs and do so securely. To successfully execute this goal, we must provide products that deliver value to all stakeholders to achieve growth differentiation. With this in mind, we have a product program that enables our engineers to innovate at scale. Today, we will be using our recently announced network convergence systems or NCS as it is termed, NCS 540 Front Hall Router Product as a case study to share the best practices that we adopted while building this product resolution. The NCS 540 Front Hall Router is the first common public radio interface or CIPRI capable 5G Front Hall Router. The product enables service operators to integrate 5G architecture options and existing technology interfaces seamlessly. So before we start, let's try to understand the industry context. Overall, the mobile operator's average revenue per user, or the ARPU as it is termed, has typically been flat or declining due to slow time to market and services innovation. There are high operational costs, high sales and deployment costs and there's a lot of pressure to drive greatest efficiencies in delivering 5G. There is pressure to expand beyond consumer services that we traditionally speak of towards automotive, healthcare, transport, and with the emergence of low latency, there is need for immersive experience to enable newer applications with AR and VR. Radio access network decisions are important and deserve a lot of attention. Given the large number of cell files already in the networks and those that will get added to meet the growing bandwidth demands from subscribers, radio access network purchases can account up to 80% of mobile operators' capital expenditures or CAPEX additionally. It's estimated that the RAM operating expenses or OPEX accounts for 60% of TCO. Consequently, there's a tremendous pressure on mobile operators to operate more efficiently and improve operational economics while meeting the increased demand of legacy, wireless services and 5G services. Additionally, there's a vendor lock-in to the RAM operators, which is leading to limited competition. Until now, the radio access network has been based on legacy network technologies. However, the increase in base stations to support 4G expansions and the new 5G service introductions is driving the mobile network operators to seek out newer strategies. The radio access network is going through massive transformation right now with decomposition, virtualization and packetization. So packetization enables radio going through packet as compared to 4G and enabling capabilities for newer applications. It's time for the radio access network to evolve to become cloud-scale software-defined and virtualized. Apart from functional benefits, there are economic benefits like reduced site management, reduced site deployment, service innovation, commoditization and improved resource utilization. To this end, the industry forums such as Open Radio Access Network or OpenRAN as we call it, IEEE subcommittees and CIPRI corporations are working with service providers to develop and test new densification strategies that can help them realize their business objectives and improve their total cost of ownership. So in terms of business objectives, as we spoke earlier, the radio access network is supposed to be open, scalable and multi-generation. This is one of the requirements. In terms of convergence, unified transport solution that addresses various verticals and categories of 5G use cases and provides agility is required. The existing radio access network uses legacy network technology or traditional mechanisms. The business objective would be to modernize the network to enable 3G, 4G, 5G with lowest total cost of ownership for front hall as compared to legacy technologies. We will talk about the product that was conceptualized to address these business outcomes and objectives. Cisco Network Convergence Systems or the NCS 540 Converged Packetized Front Hall in simple terms. Front hall is the link between the radio head to the controller and mid hall could be the link between the controller or the radio head that feeds to the next link and back hall is the connection to the internet or the core. So front hall is traditionally using traditional technologies and it has its own disadvantages. They are not scalable, architecturally rigid, topology-dependent and limited service visibility. KFIX is dependent on scale. Packet-based provides advantages and is cost-effective. Topology-independent, service-visible, transparent, scalable and indo-inconverged IP, which enables about 65% savings in DCO. When we say converged, it's about being able to support 4G LTE, CIPRI, 4G LTE, 5G and the business CPE wired customer. The solution and the routers are designed to meet and exceed stringent performance requirements of 5G, now and in the foreseeable future, which is mainly towards bandwidth, latency and scalability. This solution simplifies the mobile network architecture end-to-end and significantly reduces operational DCO. In terms of benefits, it enables service convergence towards wireless, wireline, front hall, mid hall and back hall. It also enables monetization of enterprise services. It provides high speed and ultra low latency, forwarding this precise timing and synchronization, provides end-to-end IP-based network for a simplified architecture. It also is open and automated management. The Cisco network convergence system or the NCS540 front hall router portfolio is fully programmable. It permits the customers to extend their capabilities as specifications continue to evolve. They are based on high performance, low latency. The next generation application-specific integrated circuits or ASICs, as we term it, is extended with field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs. They permit the flexibility for quickly adapting to evolving radio interface processing specifications that we just touched upon, like CEPRI, ECPRI and radiovoid Ethernet. Leveraging FPG enhanced architecture over a fixed ASIC pipeline, the Cisco front hall router product family offers flexibility that is required to address both short term and long term mobile transport requirements. The new Cisco front hall router portfolio is truly designed to protect operator investments in 5G and beyond. In terms of business impact, it provides a standardized and fully programmable solution to industry vision of radio access network desegregation at a reduced cost. It provides unified interface support, providing up to 65% TCO savings when compared to alternate technologies. It has an unmatched capacity of up to 900 gig per system to support converged use cases while help reducing the 5G Rand transport bandwidth needs up to 80%. It provides an end-to-end automation orchestration with zero-touch provisioning and closed loop feedback. So moving on, project factors that were involved that needed to be considered were, it is new evolving technologies and there's a complexity involved. There are vendor dependencies and as we spoke, the programmability comes from the FPGA for when we were dependent on a vendor and key to the program success was ensuring on the vendor dependencies. Interoperability because multiple vendors use their own implementation of SIPRI, we need to ensure interoperability with other vendors as well. So like any product development, the forming involved a strong cross-functional team formation across various stakeholders like hardware, software, manufacturing, product line marketing, technical marketing, documentation, services team, and we had a shared vision and a well-defined close interlock. Hardware and software architectures were well-defined components to use built into the plan. It was also having previously developed platforms considered and reusable components used and reusable info components for future platform developments were also built in. The vendor partners as we spoke, we were working closely with the team. We had close interactions with a clear defined RACI structure and detailed planning, tracking of milestones. As the vendor development, the team went about with the defects with service requests and modifications with modification requests. Different predictions and monitoring against actuals were also in place. The raid logs as we speak risk action issue dependencies were closely monitored. Knowing ahead, automation was leveraged throughout the lifecycle. In terms of development, early automation scripts were developed to enable early integration with the programmable images that we were getting in order to catch thought for regressions early in the cycle. Test automation scripts for key features were enabled and there were scripts to ensure the stringent requirements that we had from 5G were, baselines were maintained. In terms of tracking, different tracking with pre-scheduled automated mailers, action tracking with automated workflows were all in place. Tools were developed for new technology, tools to monitor all ports simultaneously as some of the key mentions and a smart way to analyze key 5G requirements and deployments. So we also had the various forums and governance wherein we enabled prioritize focus areas for each of the forums. Course corrections were done at frequent intervals and we completed all of this. But the main key thing was the early customer engagement where we had a core development model with customer that enabled exercising use cases with other radio vendors. Customer core development was unique in its kind of this program. The approach forward was having a core development model, front hall testing with real radios and structured feedback loop and a process to incorporate the feedback back into the appropriate releases. The outcome was to gain customer confidence in the solution, early feedback to find you the solution and have an end to end solution exposure. With this in mind, I identified customers across various geographies. We had detailed use cases, configuration grids, development image plan, a proof of concern that would enable the use case exercising with other radio vendors. A particular customer use case was when a customer was drawing using traditional front hall technology, he had a passive infrastructure and static and no dynamic fault recovery. Motivated towards a packetized front hall to ensure he leverages the advantages towards that. One of the questions asked was if the product can handle packet based network. There are two phases that we had, one with the existing platform that we had and other with the in development platform. The existing platform validated with the vendors 5G and tests completed with 100% success rate. And the next phase, the new product of NCS 540 front hall router validated with vendors 4G radio and these trials brewed that the technology works. It was tested extensively with other radio vendors and they were proven successful. In addition to the existing forums, we also had additional ones that cater to the needs of the program for architecture, core development syncups, vendor meetings and leadership deep dive. The potential day railers that we had was stringent requirements for 5G. Early testing to mitigate the risk along with factoring the fine tuning phase was incorporated. In terms of interoperability, the core development model that we just spoke about was the key. In terms of vendor deliverables and quality, automation helped throughout the lifecycle to ensure that the multiple drops were covered. The key results that we had were we had an enabled early customer deployment towards end of last year and right now though, entire product is in production. Quality wise, all the test related quality norms and security related norms were all met. In terms of interoperability, sorry, the end user customer, we had already had the models that were built in that shared the customers with the benefits that they would have. In terms of interoperability, Cisco had already tested and verified the interoperability of the product with two other vendors, which were 4G CPC based radios. In terms of patents and awards, the team had filed 10 patents as the first product in the industry that 100% complies with the open run approved specifications. So what are the NASCOM engineered in India product of the year 2021? So in summary, there was an opportunity for the company in a new market space. Evolving technology was involved working with vendors for the success of the program and customer core development was unique in its kind. Automation was enabled across the lifecycle. Tools were developed towards the requirements that we had and the key results. We had the first 5G call on the enterprise front wall network and customer deployment was done and currently the product is in production. For more information, please refer to the links here that are provided. So we probably use the remaining time for Q&A. That was great. Now folks, if you have questions, now maybe we can take additional minute or two. If you have any questions, please do ask in the Q&A section. Right now, there are no questions. How would people get in touch with you? Now look to me if there are any follow-ups at later point. Yeah, I think I was just seeing keeping a tab on the time. I think as I had earlier indicated, I need to rush for another important meeting. The team has any questions can reach out to me at the LinkedIn address that I shared at Ajayal India in my profile. So thanks, Nagar Lajmi for this. It was very insightful case study. Very exciting to see how 5G comes out in India as well. So let's see on that. So thank you for that, everyone. Hope you enjoyed our first session. Thank you, Anand. Thank you. Bye-bye.