Glotel Awards 2021 shortlist unveiled

The companies, products and services shortlisted for a Global Telecoms Award represent the best of an industry that continues to thrive.

It’s been a challenging year or so, in case you hadn’t noticed, with many industries still struggling to recover from the difficulties presented by the Covid pandemic and resulting restrictions. All the signs are, however, that telecoms has coped exceptionally well and continues to thrive and innovate in spite of everything.

The Telecoms.com team was delighted to once more be spoilt for choice by the incredibly high standard of entries to this year’s awards. We are, of course, in the middle of the rollout of a new generation of mobile technology, which in turn has lit a fire under adjacent sectors. The shortlisted entries represent a great snapshot of what the industry has been up to for the past year or so.

“We were especially impressed with the quality and quantity of entries to this year’s Glotel Awards, given the uniquely challenging business environment faced by all,” said Scott Bicheno, Editor of Telecoms.com. “The process of narrowing them down to a shortlist was as difficult as ever and many worthy entries didn’t make the cut.

“The telecoms world has demonstrated conclusively that, no matter what obstacles and headwinds it faces, the show must go on. The shortlisted achievements are a testament to the ingenuity, fortitude and downright hard work of our industry and I congratulate all of them.”

The list now passes to our panel of independent judges to determine the winners, a task that will, if anything, be even more difficult. Because of the lingering logistical challenges we won’t be hosting our usual live awards event this year. Instead Scott will enlist the help of brilliant comedian Geoff Norcott to record what should be an entertaining video announcement, which we expect to make available for viewing on 23 November. You can register to watch it here and view the shortlisted entries below.

Advancing Artificial Intelligence              

MYCOM OSI and STC – EAA portfolio and Digital Transformation Solutions

Red Hat – Turkcell cloud-native AI innovation with Red Hat OpenShift

Subex – HyperSense

Turkcell – My Gem Inside: AI-Based Emotion Recognition for Autistic Children

Whale Cloud – China Mobile ‘no-code’ intelligent data mining platform

Automation Initiative of the Year            

Ericsson – Empowering Airtel’s automation journey

Huawei – Huawei Core Network Autonomous Driving

P.I. Works – SmartPlan

Qunifi – Call2Teams

Turkcell – HyperAutomation

Best Digital Transformation Project       

Verizon + Accenture – A Digital-First Approach to Building 5G Right

Ooredoo Kuwait – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)-as-a-Service

Huawei – AI-powered Digital Transformation Project

Tata Communications – TCx Portal

Turkcell – Mobile Voice Network Transformation (VoiceX program)

Best Operator  

EE’s Network Roll Out

China Mobile International

Ooredoo Group

SK Telecom’s 5GX Hyper-connected Networks and Services

Best Operator 5G Innovation    

Altiostar – Rakuten Mobile 5G Open RAN Cloud-Native Network

Optus – Optus 5G Technology & Service Innovation

STC Bahrain – STC Bahrain 5G virtual private network

Best Vendor 5G Innovation

Amdocs – Amdocs end-to-end holistic 5G Monetization Strategy

Ericsson – Ericsson’s 5G Leadership & Innovation in Australia

Netcracker – Netcracker Non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller

Nokia – Tier 1 US 5G SA CHF Project Utilizing Design Led Thinking

DZS – DZS Chronos C1216RO open fronthaul gateway

BSS/OSS Transformation Excellence      

Beyond by BearingPoint – BNET’s cloud native BSS/OSS upgrade

Huawei – 5G BSS Reconstruction Project for China Mobile Chongqing

Lifecycle – All In One BSS

Netcracker – Netcracker Digital BSS/OSS

Telecom Argentina – #FAN

Connecting the Unconnected    

Batelco – Covering offshore islands with mobile services

Federated Wireless – Bridging the Digital Divide with CBRS Shared Spectrum

Starlogik – StarZRO

Kymeta – Kymeta u8 electronically steered satellite antenna platform and Kymeta Connect

Ufinet – Rio de Janeiro fibre network

Consumer IoT Initiative of the Year        

Huawei – China Mobile Research Institute & Huawei C-V2X Network Test Solution

Radisys – Radisys Reach Smart Home

Turkcell – Smart Micromobility with LTE-M

Digital Transformation Innovation          

VMware – Multi cloud service grid

Nexign – Nexign Microservices Framework

Nokia – Nokia Digital Assistant

STL – STL Garv

Fixed Network Evolution             

Ciena – Expansion of Universal Aggregation solution

Incognito – Monetization and Analytics Platform

Positron – G.hn Gigabit Access Multiplexer

RtBrick – RtBrick’s Virtualized Broadband Routing Software

Ground-breaking Virtualization Initiative

Altiostar – Rakuten Mobile for 5G Open RAN on Kubernetes

VMware – Telco Cloud Platform

Huawei – Huawei hitless NFVI batch upgrade solution

Enea – Telenor’s virtualization solution

Industrial IoT Initiative of the Year         

China Mobile International – RINGA

Ericsson – Ericsson IoT Accelerator platform enabling Axon’s connected cameras

Rohde & Schwarz – 5G private networks performance tuning for industrial use cases

Managed Services Innovation of the Year           

Plume – Plume’s SaaS Experience Platform

Colt Technology Services – SD WAN 2.0

Ericsson – Indosat Ooredoo & Ericsson AI/ML and Automation driven managed services transformation

STL – Auto Alert Management & Escalation

Mobile Money Mastery

6D Technologies – E-Teeru Mobile money platform

Comviva – MOVii

Subex – Mobile Money with EcoCash

Turkcell – Financell Loan

Most Innovative Cloud Service 

Colt Technology Services – Colt Cloud Services

Robin – The Robin Cloud Native Platform

Infovista – Delivering Open, Cloud-Based Network Planning Services to Rakuten Mobile

CSG – Ascendon

Most Innovative Cloud Technology

Cohere Technologies – Industry’s First 2x Spectrum Multiplier xApp for Open RAN

Symbio – Symbio’s CPaaS voice network and product launch into Singapore

Red Hat – Red Hat OpenShift

Project Delivery Perfection        

Huawei – Huawei Rock-Solid Soution

STE with Calix Professional Services – GPON and Active Ethernet-ready network built on AXOS

Solutions by STC – Dammam7 Supercomputer Project

STC – Proactive Roaming Protection

Security Solution of the Year     

AB Handshake – Call validation

Nokia – Nokia for NetGuard XDR Security Operations in 5G

Ribbon – Ribbon Call Trust

AdaptiveMobile Security, an Enea company – Unified 5G Network Security Solution

Telecoms Transformation           

Cujo AI – CUJO AI Explorer – Advanced Device Identification

Lightyear – Lightyear software platform

Liquid Intelligent Technologies & Project Taara at X – Alphabet’s moonshot factory; Connecting the capitals of DRC and Congo

Parallel Wireless – Parallel Wireless Urban Macro Open RAN Solution

Turkcell – Next Generation Notification Engine (NGNE)