Rakuten Symphony poises for disruption with Symworld

On the call with press and analysts this week, Rakuten Symphony announced that its sales pipeline looked incredibly healthy with $3 billion in bookings, and also revealed its latest development in its cloud-native operations journey: Symworld, an app store for building telecoms networks.

This is apparently the realization of a long-held ambition for Tareq Amin, Chief Technology Officer at Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony CEO, and will see Symphony customers buying cloud-native apps for OSS, engineering tasks, network management knowledge and people management, or whatever they need to build and run a network.

This concept is of course nothing new, but it is not the industry’s principal procurement or IT deployment model today, so there is an opportunity if Symphony can make it work.

The idea of an app store of modular components that are pre-approved to interoperate fits neatly into many operators’ cloud evolution strategies and may go some of the way to allaying their fears around the management of hyperscaler relationships.

At first the plan is to sell Symphony’s own software apps, with a surprisingly large initial offering of 54 products, but then open up to the vendor community to embed their own apps in the store. For an idea of who may be open to this idea in the first instance, the group of vendors that supply Rakuten Mobile in Japan is a good place to start. Amin has said in the past that the mobile operator group within the company is like a ‘live lab’ for Symphony, hammering out concepts before bringing them to market in the vendor.

Genuine potential disruption

While on the surface of things this announcement may seem like any other, there are some genuine differences here which have potential for disruption.

Firstly, Rakuten is openly talking about hyperscaler lock in and how they would act as a management layer on top of a public cloud configuration to help CSPs avoid a troublesome commercial relationship with the cloud providers. This is something that keeps coming up time and time again in the conversations I have with CSPs, a genuine fear that isn’t really being publicly discussed by other vendors

Secondly, they are talking about bringing simplification and openness to telco IT architectures in doing away with additional layers of control like the proliferation of RICs (radio intelligent controller) we are seeing now in the RAN. I am seeing quite a bit of dissatisfaction at the moment with the way 5G end to end management and orchestration is panning out in multi-vendor environments. If CSPs can get around deploying a hierarchical pile of orchestrators and controllers I believe they will. If Rakuten can offer a path of less resistance to a CSP trying to build the IT environments they need to scale 5G and move to the standalone phase, it could be a very attractive alternative to their usual software procurement strategy.

Thirdly, it seems that Symphony have big plans for the Open RAN market in Europe and is ready to pump some large investment euros into realizing those ambitions. It announced that it is ramping up their presence in Europe’s most lucrative mobile markets, with an R&D facility in the UK, a new sales office in France and in Dusseldorf, Germany, is expanding its support office which is currently centered around the 1&1 deal.

Amin said of the move “Europe is a very mature market for mobile network infrastructure and yet mobile network operators and governments are incredibly open to the opportunities Open RAN technologies can bring to the region, we are expanding our operations across Europe to strengthen our research and development capabilities and our commitment to the region. We will collaborate closely with European operators, vendors, governments and academic institutions to contribute to developing the region’s OpenRAN technologies, while working to realize our vision of providing a future-proof, cost-effective, cloud-based connectivity platform to transform the delivery of telecommunications services by mobile network operators.”

The next reveal from Rakuten Symphony will be at MWC ‘22 where it is hosting a session in one of the large halls called ‘Rakuten Symphony telco transformation lab’, which I will be attending with great interest.