In this interview from MWC Barcelona 2026, Paul Miller, chief technology officer of Wind River Systems, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante to discuss how open radio access networks and edge AI are converging to reshape telecommunications and beyond. Miller details Wind River's rise to become the leading provider of cloud infrastructure for vRAN and OpenRAN, with production deployments spanning Verizon's tens of thousands of nodes in North America, Vodafone in Europe and Telus's first O-RAN rollout in Canada. The resulting business model shift is significant – service providers are no longer locked into a single equipment supplier for a decade but can swap hardware, software and application components mid-deployment, driving down total cost of ownership across the life of the network.

The conversation also explores how Wind River is extending its telecom-hardened platform into edge AI and the enterprise. Miller walks through a Cellular V2X demonstration in which vehicles share real-time sensor data over Verizon's 5G network, enabling a car to detect pedestrians beyond its own line of sight. Underpinning these safety-critical applications is VxWorks, Wind River's 45-year-old real-time operating system, which delivers the deterministic performance that edge inference demands. From a significant ServiceNow partnership to a 20,000-server VMware migration completed in weeks, Miller outlines how Wind River's mission-critical infrastructure is gaining momentum across industrial, automotive and enterprise markets.