Rakuten Group this week announced the launch of Rakuten Symphony as a new business organization to spearhead the global adoption of cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services, including the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) by mobile network operators, enterprises and government bodies.
Rakuten Symphony’s vision is to provide a future-proven, cost-effective cloud connectivity platform. With operations across Japan, the United States, Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East Africa region, Rakuten Symphony brings together all of Rakuten’s telco products, services and solutions under a single global banner to offer 4G and 5G infrastructure and platform solutions to customers worldwide.
In addition to alignment of RCP, including Open RAN software, network automation and orchestration, Rakuten cloud infrastructure and Innoeye, Rakuten’s existing research and development, sales, marketing and delivery resources focused on the global telco segment will also be merged under Rakuten Symphony.
In addition, Rakuten also disclosed the acquisition of the remaining equity of U.S.-based mobile technology company, Altiostar Networks and a long-term partnership with German mobile operator 1&1 to build Europe's first fully virtualized mobile network based on innovative Open RAN technology. 1&1 will leverage the full Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) stack of access, core, cloud and operations solutions.
Mickey Mikitani, CEO and Rakuten Symphony Chairman, Rakuten Group
Rakuten deployed the world’s first virtualized cloud-native Open RAN network in Japan and with Rakuten Symphony we’re bringing together our global resources to take the next important step toward offering our innovative mobile network solutions to telco operators, enterprise customers and governments around the world.
Tareq Amin, CTO at Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony CEO
Building on our experience and learning from one of the most competitive markets in the world, we will be relentlessly focused on offering customers high security, quality network performance, cost transparency and the flexibility of open standards.