Sanjay Bakaya, Regional Vice-President, India, Mavenir

Bakaya believes that operators’ legacy platforms in both core networks and radio access networks (RAN) need an overhaul to support 4G traffic and be future proof for migration to 5G. With aggressive mobile tariffs, competitiveness on the total cost of ownership has become paramount, and traditional core and RAN solutions based on lock-in with purpose-built OEM are no longer best suited. Further, with the advent of network functions virtualisation (NFV), the use of common off-the-shelf hardware platforms is becoming widespread and software applications are increasingly becoming hardware agnostic.
Mavenir is a hardware-agnostic, end-to-end network software provider, helping operators reduce the cost of network management. Mavenir has a large presence in India, which accounts for almost 50 per cent of its total global employee count of 2,300. As Mavenir’s regional vice-president, India, Bakaya is responsible for driving the company’s growth.
In the past, Bakaya has worked with Motorola and Vanu, spending a decade in each of these. At Motorola, he was instrumental in setting up the first paging network in India in 1995. Later, in 2006, he was involved in securing the first 3G network contract for the company in India. He joined Vanu in 2010 and held the positions of managing director, India, and vice-president, Asia Pacific before joining Mavenir. “Vanu was focused on addressing the needs of the rural market and building networks where none existed due to commercial unviability. This was a great learning experience for me,” he says. He also held the position of secretary general of the Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association during the period 2008-10.
Bakaya has an inclusive style of management. “I believe that empowerment, trust and transparency are key for effective functioning of a team,” he says. Bakaya is an electronics and telecommunications engineer from the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar. For him, the biggest stress-buster is spending time with family, which includes his parents, his wife and their two daughters, one of whom is pursuing architecture in Chicago and the other is studying in Grade 10.
- Most Viewed
- Most Rated
- Most Shared
- Related Articles
- Sunil Tolani, COO, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Idea Cellular
- Mahendra Nahata, Head, HFCL
- Prateek Pashine, President, SME Operations, Tata Communications
- Sanjoy Mukerji, Director, Business Operations, North and East India, Vodafone Essar
- Raju Vegesna, MD and CEO, Sify Technologies
- Abhishek Chauhan, Senior Consultant, ICT, South Asia and Middle East, Frost & Sullivan
- K.C. Narendran, Circle Business Head, Uttar Pradesh (West), Uninor
- Navin Kaul, COO, Viom Networks Limited
- S.P. Shukla, President and CEO, Reliance Communications
- Ozi Amanat, Chief Investment Officer, Spice Global
- Navin Kaul, COO, Viom Networks Limited
- Suraj Parkash Sharma, National Head, O&M, TowerVision India
- Abhishek Chauhan, Senior Consultant, ICT, South Asia and Middle East, Frost & Sullivan
- Rajiv Garg, Business Head, Telecom Towers, Moser Baer Clean Energy Limited
- Faisal Siddiqui, Country Head, HTC India