Rakuten launches Rakuten Symphony to accelerate adoption of cloud-native, Open RAN-based mobile networks worldwide

Tokyo, Japan, August 4, 2021 – Rakuten Group, Inc., a global leader in internet services, today 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.

Rakuten Group CEO and Rakuten Symphony Chairman Mickey Mikitani commented, “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, Chief Technology Officer at Rakuten Group and Rakuten Symphony CEO said, “With Rakuten Symphony, we’re more than excited to empower greenfield and brownfield telco operators, enterprises and governments around the world to easily build and deploy cloud-native network services. 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.”

In addition, Rakuten disclosed today the acquisition of the remaining equity of U.S.-based mobile technology company, Altiostar Networks, Inc. Rakuten and Altiostar will partner to accelerate deployment of software-centric, virtualized services for the mobile industry across the globe.

Rakuten also announced today 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.

Rakuten’s move into the global telco platform business with a successful reference from its mobile arm in Japan is expected to further differentiate its position as a global leader in cloud-centric, virtualized, Open RAN-based mobile networks.

Rakuten Symphony looks forward to making further announcements soon relevant to global expansion, sales activities and product development and innovations.