Accenture on Monday announced that it has helped Rakuten Mobile launch its fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network, from business model design to development and operation.
Rakuten Mobile’s network is fully virtualized, meaning hardware and software can be managed as a single entity. Such an approach enables network operators to minimize the cost of building, maintaining and operating large-scale infrastructure, helping increase the competitiveness of their service.
In a bid to reinvent how the network is built and operated, Rakuten Mobile enlisted the help of Accenture to design a new organization and business model to support the launch of its fully virtualized mobile network. In addition to providing overall project management, Accenture also developed new operations engineering capabilities to help Rakuten Mobile better monitor and manage the performance and architectural integrity of the network.
Accenture also helped design Rakuten Mobile’s Service Experience Center, a customer-centric variation of the traditional network operations center. The Service Experience Center team is managing operations and acquiring new capabilities as Rakuten Mobile’s network evolves.
In addition, Accenture supported the development and integration of Rakuten Mobile’s Network Operating System (RNOS), which enables near real-time monitoring and control of the network. Leveraging machine learning based on real-time data reports from across the platform, the RNOS enables proactive fault detection and prevention and enhances network performance and reliability. Through the development of the RNOS platform, Accenture is helping Rakuten Mobile increase the efficiency of its operations workforce, enabling the company to pass operational savings directly to customers across Japan.
Tareq Amin, Rakuten Group EVP and Rakuten Mobile CTO
With Accenture’s support, we have been able to transform how we operate — harnessing new network engineering principles, automation and emerging technologies — to make the world’s first fully virtualized cloud-native network a reality.
Francesco Venturini, a senior managing director at Accenture
Our approach to this bold project has been to share and amplify Rakuten’s sense of discovery by helping to explore the unknown, making investments in the development of 5G and edge cloud, and bringing together the people, capabilities and assets from across Accenture’s global network to help Rakuten Mobile forge the path forward.
