Orchestrating Open RAN: The Real Challenge Behind Multi-Vendor Networks

Open RAN promised operators freedom from single-vendor lock-in: mix and match the best hardware and software across the RAN stack. In reality, breaking the stack apart did not eliminate integration complexity. It transferred it to operators. 

Every deployment now requires coordinating planning data, configurations, scripts, validations, and updates across vendors using different tools and interfaces. What one vendor once handled internally is now the responsibility of the operator’s integration team. 

For large-scale deployments, this becomes the operational bottleneck that determines rollout speed and efficiency. 

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How the Integration Burden Grew

Dense 5G deployments require more sites with tighter configuration requirements, multiplying integration complexity across multi-vendor environments.

The ecosystem’s response has often made the problem worse. Vendors introduced their own automation and integration platforms, leaving operators managing disconnected tools that rarely work together seamlessly. Teams adopt separate planning and design systems, creating fragmented workflows, manual handoffs, and increased risk of delays and errors.

This model does not scale. Operators managing hundreds of sites can absorb the complexity with enough engineering resources. Operators deploying thousands of sites across vendors like Nokia and Ericsson eventually hit operational limits.

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The Accountability Gap Nobody Talks About

Traditional single-vendor deployments offered clear accountability: one vendor owned the stack and resolved issues end-to-end.

In multi-vendor Open RAN environments, interoperability issues can emerge anywhere (interfaces, protocols, data formats, or configurations) with no single party responsible for the integrated outcome. Vendors often point elsewhere while operators absorb the costs through delayed rollouts, rework, and rising operational expenses.

This accountability gap is not solved by contracts alone. It requires operators to own the integration layer with automation and intelligence capable of managing complexity at scale.

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Reailize Low-Touch Site Integration

Operators scaling fastest are automating site integration end-to-end rather than treating it as a manual engineering process. Reailize pioneered Low-Touch Site Integration to address exactly this challenge. Low-touch site integration uses agentic AI-driven automation to collect network requirements, generate and execute scripts, validate configurations, and provision sites with minimal human intervention . Engineers focus only on pre-defined approval steps, exceptions and strategic decisions. The gains are significant: faster onboarding, lower integration costs, fewer manual errors, and the ability to scale rollout capacity without proportional headcount growth.

Reailize built its Low-Touch Site Integration platform specifically for multi-vendor Open RAN environments, providing a vendor-agnostic workflow that integrates Nokia, Ericsson, and other vendors through a single automation layer.  

Teams can initiate integrations through a Gen-AI chat interface, while the platform automatically collects network requirements from existing planning and design systems, generates site specifications, automates scripting and validation, and supports one-click provisioning and zero-touch integration where supported by the operator.  

Real-time dashboards provide full project visibility cross vendors for the management, into rollout progress, alarms, and site health, while reporting tools help operators identify and eliminate recurring integration issues systematically. Reailize works alongside existing operator ecosystems rather than replacing them, acting as the coordination layer across the deployment workflow.

In one recent engagement, a Tier-1 North American mobile operator needed to integrate more than 2,000 greenfield sites across both Ericsson and Nokia equipment, and was struggling with slow, manual, and regionally inconsistent processes. Reailize deployed its Low-Touch Site Integration solution to orchestrate the full journey, from design intake to post-launch validation: standardized APIs replaced fragmented tools, version-controlled templates auto-generated scripts on demand, and sites were remotely provisioned via SSH tunnels and secure NMS APIs, eliminating the need for SMEs on-site.  

The result was a 4x increase in rollout velocity, with integration timelines shrinking from weeks to days and configuration validation dropping from hours to minutes.

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The Broader Lesson for Open RAN Deployments

Open RAN complexity will continue to grow as networks evolve toward AI-RAN and eventually 6G. More vendors, denser deployments, and more frequent software updates will expand the integration challenge, not reduce it.

The operators that succeed will not be those with the largest integration teams, but those with the automation infrastructure to coordinate vendors, maintain consistency, and scale efficiently.

The real value, however, lies in knowing exactly where to focus. Where teams spend time. Where decisions slow things down. Where manual effort keeps repeating. And where automation can actually create impact.

At Reailize, we approach process mapping and automation as a business transformation exercise. Drawing on service-as-software models, we combine workflow visibility, BPMN-based orchestration, operational scoring, and human-in-the-loop automation strategies, not as isolated tools, but as a coherent system for redesigning how work flows across teams, systems, and operations.

The goal is not simply to automate tasks. The goal is to fundamentally change the structure of operational work itself.

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