TOKYO – Rakuten Symphony today announced the appointment of Zia Syed as President of its Symworld™ Platform Business Group. Syed will focus on unlocking the full capabilities of the Symworld Platform to help mobile network operators speed efforts to overcome operational complexity and deliver differentiated services. This includes driving customer confidence in the power of automation at scale. He joins Rakuten Symphony from Dell Technologies, where he served as CTO, 5G Solutions, and will report directly to Tareq Amin, CEO, Rakuten Symphony.

“Telecom’s key challenge is not technology innovation, but undertaking a mindset shift that brings confidence in adopting and operating modern, cloud-native system approaches,” said Zia Syed, President, Symworld Platform Business Group at Rakuten Symphony.

Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld platform gives mobile network operators intuitive, one-touch access to a suite of next-gen network software applications for industrialized automation of new and existing networks.

“Operational complexities have created problems that are limiting operators’ options to scale and monetize their networks with better services,” commented Tareq Amin. “With Zia Syed now at the helm, Symworld is poised to address these challenges and help accelerate telco industry change.”

Operators must pursue rapid innovation cycles to create new value propositions for customers. The cloud-native platform will help operators free capital tied to manual and non-differentiated system integration tasks to focus on service innovation outside of the typical ten-year, G-based architecture construct.

Syed continued, “With the Symworld platform, we’re changing that mindset while realizing a vision of a new digital SI enabler for onboarding complex telco workloads in a cloud environment. And for me, the timing couldn’t be better to embark on this journey with Rakuten Symphony as we are at the cusp of next-gen network-enabled services, the maturity of cloud platforms, and industry readiness to move in a new direction. Rakuten Symphony and the Symworld platform will lead the change the industry needs.”

Prior to his work with Dell Technologies, Syed spent nearly a decade at Ericsson with leadership roles including CTO and VP of product engineering, Head of Ericsson Industry Connect, and CTO, Business Innovation 5G and Edge. He earned a BE, Computer Engineering at NED University of Engineering and Technology, and MSc, Advance Software Engineering at University of York.