Rakuten Symphony had several announcements today, coinciding with MWC 2022, happening in Barcelona, Spain. The company said it is purchasing a Silicon Valley cloud startup; and it announced new partnerships with AT&T and Cisco.
Rakuten Symphony is buying the U.S.-based cloud technology company Robin.io, and it has named Robin.io’s founder and CEO Partha Seetala to take up the position of president of the Unified Cloud business unit of Rakuten Symphony. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Robin.io will bring its multi-cloud mobility, automation and orchestration capabilities, which allow for the creation of high-performance cloud infrastructure from the edge to the central data center.
Collaboration between Rakuten and Robin.io has already been underway for more than two years, since Rakuten Mobile leveraged Robin.io in its greenfield, cloud-native, mobile network. Now, Rakuten Symphony will provide Robin.io’s technology to customers around the globe.
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“Robin.io’s cloud capability is proven to be effective for the most demanding workloads in mobile, and we believe it will allow Rakuten Symphony to safely accelerate cloud-native transformation for our customers and prepare the industry for the future,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony.
As an aside, Amin’s responsibilities were expanded last week when he was named as CEO of Rakuten Mobile. So, he now leads both Rakuten’s mobile business as well as Rakuten Symphony, which is the mobile technology vendor arm for the Japanese conglomerate.
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Rakuten Symphony aims to disrupt the traditional telecom vendor landscape by packaging the technologies it created from building the Rakuten Mobile network. Rakuten Symphony has headquarters in Japan with local presence in the U.S., Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East/Africa region.
In terms of the purchase of Robin.io, Seetala said, “I am delighted that Robin.io’s technology innovations over the last several years will now get a much bigger canvas to lead the vision for cloud-native transformation for the industry.”
Robin.io has petabyte-size deployments with its software running on tens of thousands of servers in production today, globally.
AT&T and Rakuten Symphony
In other news today, AT&T and Rakuten Symphony began an initial relationship, agreeing to work together within the Rakuten Symphony Symworld platform.
Symworld offers access to a suite of next-gen network software apps to design, deploy and operate both greenfield and brownfield mobile networks.
AT&T is currently deploying Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager, a solutions suite within the Symworld platform, that simplifies the design and build workflows for network rollouts. The suite is for both wireless and wireline networks and designed to drive faster deployment cycles.
For its part, Rakuten Symphony is integrating AT&T’s homegrown technology platform for capacity planning within its Symworld platform.
RELATED: Analysts confirm Rakuten Mobile’s network saves 40% capex on per site basis
Andre Fuetsch, network chief technology officer at AT&T, said, “Our collaboration with Rakuten Symphony helps expand and enhance the transformation of our network as well as across our global industry to build and operate more resilient networks in a new architecture stack with less manual touches.”
Rakuten and Cisco
Finally, today in Barcelona, Rakuten Symphony and Cisco signed a Memorandum of Understanding to accelerate the delivery for cloud-native, virtualized 4G/5G mobile networks based on open radio access network (RAN) technology.
This endeavor expands on the partnership between Cisco and Rakuten that began four years ago – working together as early champions for open RAN and building the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud-native network for Rakuten Mobile.
RELATED: Cisco installs 4,000 edge nodes for Rakuten’s wireless network
The companies say they have crossed many important milestones over the last four years, and they are now applying best practices to develop software-defined solutions optimized for the competitive mobile environment.
Notable components of the solutions include Cisco’s routing, switching and automation portfolios, along with Rakuten Symphony’s open RAN, orchestration and the full suite of its Symworld applications.
The two companies plan to work together to validate and certify these solutions for global service providers.