As director, technical and commercial, ZTE India, Ranjan Sharma is leading the company’s technical initiatives and strategy formulation for telecom operators. He is responsible for promoting various end-to-end technologies such as 3G-high speed packet access, long term evolution, IP multimedia subsystem, cloud computing and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. “The focus is on bringing out the value proposition of technology products and solutions offered by ZTE to operators.”

Sharma has 18 years of industry experience, in addition to his ZTE stint, and has been associated with organisations such as Punjab Communications and Ericsson. He started his career as a research and development engineer, developing indigenous designs for radio and satellite product lines. The major part of his career has been devoted to developing code division multiple access-based solutions. He has also been involved in pre-sales for end-to-end technology solutions to leading operators across India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Sharma views each of his assignments as a challenge and has always strived to give it his best shot. He finds his current assignment at ZTE to be immensely satisfying. The entire process of discussing the benefits and implementation strategies for new technologies and solutions with industry leaders keeps him excited and enthused.

Dealing as he does with technology on a daily basis, Sharma has his pulse on industry trends. “The industry has witnessed the growth of voice and now it is experiencing a mobile broadband revolution and a data explosion,” he says. “The next wave of growth will be brought about by the increasing adoption of M2M communication, internet of things, virtualisation of hardware and software, software-defined network and network function virtualisation standards. The emergence of these technologies offers significant growth opportunities to the industry and it is up to the vendors to tap the same.”