Jitin Bhandari is executive vice president, NeoCloud Platform and Forward Deployment Engineering, for Mavenir. [Photo: Mavenir]

Richardson-based Mavenir has hired a longtime Nokia executive to lead its expansion into a fast-growing corner of the cloud computing market known as neocloud. Neocloud is industry shorthand for providers that sell access to graphics processing units, or GPUs, built for AI and other high-performance workloads as a service.

Jitin Bhandari joins the wireless software company as executive vice president, NeoCloud Platform and Forward Deployment Engineering. He will report to President and CEO Pardeep Kohli.

Mavenir, which provides cloud-native software for the wireless industry, said that Bhandari will lead the firm’s expansion into the rapidly growing neocloud market. He will also develop a Forward Deployment Engineering practice to support Mavenir’s communications service provider and neocloud customer bases. 

“I am delighted to welcome Jitin to Mavenir at a pivotal moment for our industry,” Kohli said in a statement. “We helped our customers transition from proprietary systems to cloud-native architectures, and we are now well positioned to help them adopt and operationalize AI in all aspects of their business.”

Building on its recently announced AI-Integrated Platform and AI Service Assurance framework for communications service providers, Mavenir said it is expanding its AI platform, tools and cloud-native expertise to support neocloud providers. The company said this “represents a significant new market opportunity” to add to its existing global base of mobile network operators, communications service providers and hyperscalers.

Veteran telecom tech leader

Bhandari has nearly 30 years of experience in telecommunications, software-native technologies, product innovation and business leadership. Most recently, Bhandari served as chief technology officer for cloud and network services at Nokia. There, he led technology strategy and innovation across cloud-native and AI-powered networking solutions. During his time at Nokia, he also served as chief product officer for core network applications and as vice president and general manager of digital networks.

Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Oracle, Acme Packet and Alcatel-Lucent, helping advance the industry’s transition to cloud-native architectures, network virtualization, software-defined networking and real-time communications services.

“This is an exciting time to join Mavenir,” Bhandari said. “The company has built a strong foundation in cloud-native, software-based networks and is uniquely positioned to lead the transition toward AI-by-design and agentic operations.”

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