Employee Spotlight – Sriram Suresh

At the Innovators in Action awards ceremony earlier this year, CommScope named “Spirit of Innovation” winners from each of our organization’s participating business segments. The award recognizes leaders from our technical community whose innovative spirit inspires others to collaborate and work toward meaningful change. Sriram Suresh, Ph.D., director, Engineering, won a Spirit of Innovation award for the Networking, Intelligent Cellular & Security Solutions (NICS) segment.

Sriram is responsible for the architecture, design and development of multiple Wi-Fi, LTE and 5G technologies. He?holds 52+ patents and leads a team of 80+ engineers based around the globe, who work together from product concept to development and deployment. The team also designs signal processing algorithms, multi-core/multi-processor frameworks, cloudification and virtualization of software and hardware components, deployment performance improvements, and works closely with standards bodies like 3GPP, ORAN, IEEE, etc.?

Since joining CommScope in 2015, various opportunities to build innovative solutions for customer challenges helped him find growth in his role. As a natural problem-solver, Sriram says his passion for innovation is driven by a desire to see CommScope stand out among industry challengers. “I’ve worked to build the architecture for ONECELL? 4G, 5G RAN and DAS products. I want best-in-class architecture that will differentiate us from other offerings,” explained Sriram.?

Among that differentiation is an innovative 5G physical layer that Sriram conceptualized and built. The 5G physical layer sets CommScope apart in the market because it runs on commercial off-the-shelf hardware that doesn’t require custom accelerator cards. This enables CommScope’s 5G RAN solution to run on all cloud systems and allows customers to use their own hardware for deployment.

“CommScope is positioned in a unique way to work with hyperscale cloud providers,” Sriram added.

For more than seven years, Sriram has helped make a difference by collaborating with other business segments throughout the organization.?For example, he?worked to?come up with 5G RAN and DAS Systems convergence to a single platform — an innovation that Sriram said is among a long list of proud achievements he’s accomplished while at CommScope.

Among his memorable projects, Sriram spoke about a converged solution that brings RAN and DAS systems closer than ever, bringing the best of both products together to solve the users’ coverage and capacity challenges. For him, working to create solutions of such magnitude excites him to do the work he does.?

“Getting to know the customer issues directly or through sales teams makes me look for innovative means to address their concerns and introduce benefits,” he explains. “The opportunity to brainstorm and discuss market trends and competitors with our senior leaders helps to define better products for CommScope.”

Sriram embodies the spirit of innovation and is a champion for emerging industry trends. His contributions are representative of the innovative attitude that can be found in our team members worldwide. His humble reaction to receiving the Spirit of Innovation Award was not to revel in his own recognition, but rather to acknowledge how it encourages creativity throughout the company.

“The Spirit of Innovation Award enables the unique and innovative aspects of CommScope’s 5G solution to be shared with a wider audience,” he said of the recognition. “This will lead to even more innovation for our existing solutions.”

Talking about his inspirations, Sriram looks up to Steve Jobs for his work and draws life lessons from Ratan Tata. Advice he has for aspiring professionals looking to thrive in the industry is to look for innovative architectures and solutions: “Every time you design the system, challenge the existing solutions to come up with new ones. Aim to reinvent solutions every 24 months.”

Outside of work, Sriram enjoys farming, mountain hiking, and reading books.

Join CommScope and work alongside people who make an impact through their innovative solutions. Explore open roles in our global teams and apply here today: https://careers.commscope.com/