Vodafone opens €225m European R&D Centre in Spain
Vodafone has opened its new centralized European R&D Centre in Malaga, Spain, to develop chip architectures for Open RAN.
The €225m investment over five years will see the international hub design global digital solutions, including chip architectures with plans to recruit 600 staff. The centre will work with Intel as well as with ARM and RISC-V architectures.
“The opening of the Vodafone European R&D Centre in Malaga reflects Vodafone’s commitment and commitment to the Spanish market and consolidates us as a key investor for the development of future digital infrastructures, solutions and services that favour progress socioeconomic. It will also help Spain continue to be a pole of attraction for digital talent and an international benchmark in the creation of products and services based on innovation and new first-class technologies,” said Colman Deegan, CEO of Vodafone Spain.
The centre is part of Vodafone’s plan to recruit almost 7,000 software engineers across Europe by 2025, through a combination of recruitment, skills training for current employees and internalisation. The offices and laboratories will be equipped with 5G networks, ultra-fast fibre and the latest technologies.
The Vodafone Business R&D Centre, which has already opened its doors to the first 40 employees at the Impact Hub coworking centre in Malaga, is specializing on unified communications, IoT (Internet of Things), Edge Computing , MPN (Mobile Private Network) and OpenRAN (the standard for open and interoperable networks). This will also manage the commercial operations of the Vodafone Group and business clients in 11 countries.
Skills
The centre is recruiting product and solution architects, scrum masters, software engineers, developers (front-end and back-end), data engineers, UX experts, experts in digital sales processes, data, Cloud developers, experts in innovation and financing projects and experts in blockchain and cybersecurity.
Some of the key projects for the Centre include complete IoT projects for Consumer Goods and Home, Automotive, Security and Cloud, Logistics, Smart Cities or Industry 4.0, and the development of Internet platforms of Things for digital businesses. A Digital Transformation Design Centre will also be created with experts in customer experience, the management of private mobile networks, the development of 5G applications, the use of machine learning in networks, or the creation of digital interfaces will be promoted.
Open RAN
Another key area will be the design of specifications for Open RAN chips. The company has run two interoperability demonstrations for Open RAN, connecting components of different element manufacturers, which have collaboration agreements with Vodafone such as Samsung, Intel, Dell Technologies, Lime Microsystems and Keysight Technologies.
Eight cities from five European countries participated in the tender for the centre before Malaga was selected.
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