The client is a global leader in cloud-native, open and virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) and 5G Core software solutions. It serves telecommunications operators worldwide, enabling them to deploy disaggregated, cost-efficient 5G networks built on open standards, competing directly with traditional, proprietary telecom infrastructure vendors.
The race to monetize 5G is forcing telecom software vendors to confront a hard truth: the platforms that managed yesterday’s 4G networks were never designed for the scale, speed or complexity of tomorrow’s 5G services. The consequences are measurable and urgent.
Telecom businesses still spend 60-80% of their IT budgets on maintaining legacy systems, budget that cannot be redirected toward innovation or growth. The 5G OSS/BSS market was valued at $72 billion in 2025, growing at a CAGR of 8.7% through 2034, creating enormous competitive pressure on vendors to modernize. Hence, the path forward is clear: legacy modernization can deliver up to 60% of operational cost savings for operators willing to make the transition.
For the client, these pressures were translated into direct commercial risk. Its legacy 4G EMS could not support the multi-tenant scale, 3GPP compliance or cloud-native agility that its operator customers now demanded. Without transformation, the client faced eroding market relevance and stalled revenue growth in the fastest-growing segment of the global telecom industry.
A Legacy Platform That was Costing the Client its Customers and Revenue
The client’s legacy 4G EMS had become a structural barrier to growth. With operator customers accelerating their 5G rollouts, the inability to deliver granular 5G KPI and performance reporting meant the client could not unlock new, higher-margin managed service contracts. This directly constrained its revenue potential and competitive differentiation. The platform’s monolithic, single-tenant architecture compounded the problem: it could serve only one operator at a time, preventing the client from scaling its customer base efficiently and capping total addressable revenue. High manual operational overhead, absence of cloud-agnostic deployment and outdated security protocols further exposed the client to rising support costs and regulatory risk. With rivals moving to cloud-native, multi-tenant platforms, continued dependence on legacy infrastructure risked both customer churn and long-term loss of market share in the rapidly expanding 5G software segment.
The client operates at the cutting edge of open RAN and disaggregated 5G: highly specialized domain where most system integrators lack the depth to execute without a steep learning curve. The client needed more than an implementation partner; it needed a team capable of original engineering thinking within complex 3GPP and open-source telecom environments.
Persistent’s selection came down to its telecom-native engineering talent, proven experience with open-source network software stacks and its model of embedding as a product engineering partner, aligned to commercial outcomes, not just delivery milestones. Critically, Persistent demonstrated the ability to build where no off-the-shelf solution existed: developing a proprietary Yang validation library and a custom leader election library from first principles, filling critical gaps that the open-source community had not addressed. This combination of domain authority and engineering originality made Persistent the right partner to lead a transformation of this complexity and consequence.
Rebuilding from the Ground Up: A Cloud-Native 5G EMS Engineered for Scale
Persistent decomposed the client’s monolithic 4G EMS into a microservices-based, cloud-agnostic 5G platform, engineered on Kubernetes and designed to support up to 1,000 tenants. We executed the transformation across five interconnected solution tenets.
Designed to Serve up to 1,000 Operators from a Single Platform: The legacy monolith was re-architected into a Kubernetes-native, cloud-agnostic platform with a new Super Admin console for centralized tenant onboarding. Our team standardized the deployment across IPv4 and IPv6 environments via a customizable umbrella shell script.
Unlocking 5G Revenue with Full Compliance and Performance Reporting: Persistent delivered full 3GPP NBI API compliance alongside 250+ custom 5G KPI and PI additions. The team integrated automated 3GPP Performance File generation and Northbound agency notification into the platform workflow.
Eliminating Downtime Risk Across Geographies: We achieved enterprise-grade availability through PostgreSQL High Availability, a three-node Cassandra cluster and a custom-built leader election library for geo-redundant failover. This ensured continuous platform operation across geographically dispersed regions.
Full Network Visibility and a Security Posture Fit for Enterprise Operators: Persistent established end-to-end observability via OpenSearch, Prometheus and Grafana, delivering full FCAPS compliance and 100% distributed traceability. The team also hardened security through JWT SSO integration with LDAP and OKTA.
Engineering Quality Built to Last and Innovate: Persistent increased automated test coverage from under 5% to 75% and developed two proprietary components, a Yang validation library and a leader election library, to address open-source gaps. We validated the solution against 200 real and simulated 5G devices, achieving 90% regression test coverage.
From Legacy Constraint To 5G Market Leadership in Six Months
With Persistent, the client was able to unlock new 5G revenue streams, scale its customer base tenfold and bring a market-ready platform to its operator customers in half a year.
New 5G Revenue Unlocked: 3GPP NBI API compliance and 250+ custom KPI/PI additions enabled the client to offer operator customers the performance visibility they require, opening the door to new managed service contracts and higher-margin engagements.
10x Growth in Serviceable Customer Base: Moving from a single-tenant legacy platform to an architecture designed for up to 1,000-tenants expanded the client’s capacity to onboard and serve operators at scale, directly growing its addressable market.
Full Platform Delivered in 6 Months: Against the multi-year timelines typical of legacy overhauls, Persistent delivered a production-ready platform in six months with 8 operator PoCs completed in the same period, giving the client a validated product to take to market immediately.
Lower Cost to Serve: Automated, microservices-based operations replaced manual, monolithic workflows, reducing support overhead and enabling the client to serve more customers without proportional cost increases.
SLA Reliability Operators Can Count On: Geo-redundancy and the custom leader election library eliminated single points of failure, strengthening the client’s ability to meet enterprise-grade uptime commitments to operator customers.
Engineering Foundation Built for the Long Term: Test coverage rose from under 5% to 75% and 90% regression coverage across all scenarios, giving the client a maintainable, extensible codebase ready for future 5G standards and feature expansion.
Faster Time-to-Value for Operator Customers: With 250+ new 5G KPIs available from day one, operator customers gained immediate visibility into network performance, enabling faster troubleshooting, proactive service optimization and stronger end-customer experience.
The Persistent Edge: Where Telecom Depth Meets Cloud-Native Execution
Where comparable overhauls typically take years, what made this transformation possible in six months was Persistent’s combination of telecom domain depth and cloud-native engineering rigor. The team did not arrive with a generic modernization playbook. It brought practitioners fluent in 3GPP standards and open-source telecom tooling, capable of making first-principles engineering decisions where no off-the-shelf solution existed, including two proprietary components built from scratch.
This depth enabled speed without compromise: the delivered platform was fully compliant, production-ready and validated against two hundred real and simulated 5G devices. Persistent engaged not as an external vendor but as an extension of the client’s product organization, aligned to its commercial outcomes, not just its technical requirements. The result was: a client repositioned to win. It was able to serve operator tenants on a scalable platform, compliant with the standards the market demands and equipped to monetize 5G at a pace its legacy system never allowed.
