DTWS: Rakuten Group's CTO gives details of Symphony
Rakuten recently announced its cloud connectivity platform globally for communication service providers (CSPs), enterprises and government bodies, called Rakuten Symphony. Tareq Amin, Rakuten Group’s Group Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten Group fleshed out some of the details around the new service at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series.
27 Sep 2021
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DTWS: Rakuten Group's CTO gives details of Symphony
Rakuten recently announced its cloud connectivity platform for communication service providers (CSPs), enterprises and government bodies, called Rakuten Symphony. Tareq Amin, Rakuten Group’s Group Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten Group fleshed out some of the details around the new service at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series.
One of the industry’s more vocal proponent of cloud-native, open RAN infrastructure and services, Rakuten set up Rakuten Symphony in August this year to provide 4G and 5G infrastructure and platform solutions worldwide. Its aim is to build “a truly elastic software cloud architecture for mobile service providers, as well as government and private enterprises,” said Amin.
“I think the industry as a whole is recognizing the criticality and the importance of moving workloads to cloud,” said Amin, which includes looking “at their radio as a disaggregated, virtualized fully automated platform to also be part of this totality of the solution.”
“The network … is not only about low cost,” he explained. “It's really driven by significant automation, architecture, the embodiment of AI and machine learning into the DNA of how this network runs and organizes itself.”
Symphony incorporates five business units, which deliver different components of unified cloud services, explained Amin. Altiostar, which Rakuten purchased outright in August 2021, “has become the new business unit called network functions, in which we will have both radio core and media platforms.” The other units within Symphony are “intelligent operation, billing stack, [and the] Internet and ecosystem services group.”
“These products are consumed as an individual product offering, or they can be consumed as a total, and integrated stack, similar to what we have done with 1 &1 in Germany.” (In August, Rakuten announced a partnership with Germany’s 1&1 to build a fully virtualized mobile network based on Open RAN.)
These units “have a different business objective and different PNL from Rakuten Mobile”, which is Rakuten Symphony’s customer, Amin explained.
At the same time “Symphony needs Rakuten Mobile to ... utilize its products [and] its technology to continue to provide a validation ground and Symphony to take the experiences, the lessons learned from packages, and then go to the rest of the globe,” said Amin. “We knew that we needed a business entity to host our products and platforms.”
Rakuten Symphony has no interest in straying into hardware, A But we certainly have a lot of capabilities … when it comes to reference design,” he claimed. "We are really good at building a robust scalable reference architecture for both more workloads, as well as complex workloads."
“This reference architecture Rakuten Symphony would be open … because we want to create an ecosystem in which we see value in companies providing hardware.”
Watch Tareq's interview during the Digital Transformation World Series on Making the vision a reality: uniting an industry to drive growth in the digital age:
One of the industry’s more vocal proponent of cloud-native, open RAN infrastructure and services, Rakuten set up Rakuten Symphony in August this year to provide 4G and 5G infrastructure and platform solutions worldwide. Its aim is to build “a truly elastic software cloud architecture for mobile service providers, as well as government and private enterprises,” said Amin.
“I think the industry as a whole is recognizing the criticality and the importance of moving workloads to cloud,” said Amin, which includes looking “at their radio as a disaggregated, virtualized fully automated platform to also be part of this totality of the solution.”
“The network … is not only about low cost,” he explained. “It's really driven by significant automation, architecture, the embodiment of AI and machine learning into the DNA of how this network runs and organizes itself.”
Symphony incorporates five business units, which deliver different components of unified cloud services, explained Amin. Altiostar, which Rakuten purchased outright in August 2021, “has become the new business unit called network functions, in which we will have both radio core and media platforms.” The other units within Symphony are “intelligent operation, billing stack, [and the] Internet and ecosystem services group.”
“These products are consumed as an individual product offering, or they can be consumed as a total, and integrated stack, similar to what we have done with 1 &1 in Germany.” (In August, Rakuten announced a partnership with Germany’s 1&1 to build a fully virtualized mobile network based on Open RAN.)
These units “have a different business objective and different PNL from Rakuten Mobile”, which is Rakuten Symphony’s customer, Amin explained.
At the same time “Symphony needs Rakuten Mobile to ... utilize its products [and] its technology to continue to provide a validation ground and Symphony to take the experiences, the lessons learned from packages, and then go to the rest of the globe,” said Amin. “We knew that we needed a business entity to host our products and platforms.”
Rakuten Symphony has no interest in straying into hardware, A But we certainly have a lot of capabilities … when it comes to reference design,” he claimed. "We are really good at building a robust scalable reference architecture for both more workloads, as well as complex workloads."
“This reference architecture Rakuten Symphony would be open … because we want to create an ecosystem in which we see value in companies providing hardware.”
Watch Tareq's interview during the Digital Transformation World Series on Making the vision a reality: uniting an industry to drive growth in the digital age:
