Orex Sai appointed Kenichi Takai as its representative director and COO.

Takai joins the joint open radio access network (RAN) venture between NTT Docomo and NEC from a managing director role at the latter.

In a LinkedIn post, Orex Sai said Takai has more than three decades of experience at NEC, spanning the development and commercialization of mobile networks from 2G to 5G. Most recently, Takai led the RAN business for domestic mobile network operators in Japan, contributing to RAN virtualization, commercial deployment, and network modernization.

Kenichi will oversee Orex Sai's sales and network services divisions and play a key role in accelerating its global growth plans.

Launched in 2023, Orex Sai is NEC and Docomo’s bid for full-scale global deployment of open RAN services based around the latter’s Orex platform. The venture was launched with 13 partners, including AMD, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Mavenir, and Nvidia.

Singapore-based RAN company SynaXG was added to the list this year when it announced a partnership with Orex Sai and Red Hat, demonstrating one of the industry’s earliest implementations of a unified cloud-native platform AI-augmented RAN (AI-RAN).

As part of the demo, SynaXG used its complete AI-RAN software stack, including layer-one, layer-two, and layer-three microservices on Red Hat’s OpenShift cloud-native platform. The project also supports Project Aura, a plan backed by the likes of Orex Sai to move AI-RAN from concept to real-world implementation.

“The project plans to use open network APIs, such as TM Forum-compliant APIs and Camara APIs, to integrate OSS/BSS (operating support systems/business support systems) with Edge AI applications. Examples include video analytics, drone control, and location-based services,” Orex CTO Sadayuki Abeta explained of that work. “This approach will help operators deliver value beyond being just connectivity providers.”