The partners are bringing together their strengths to offer solutions to help mobile operators to compete more effectively in the cloud era
Cisco partners with Rakuten Symphony to accelerate open RAN and telco cloud market. (Credit: Kjetil Ree/Wikipedia.org)
Cisco and Rakuten Symphony have agreed to combine their respective strengths to expedite the delivery for cloud-native, virtualised 4G/5G mobile networks based on open radio access network (ORAN) technology.
The companies have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in this regard at MWC Barcelona 2022 in Spain.
Rakuten Symphony is a relatively new business of Japan-based Rakuten Group. It was formed by Rakuten for helping in the adoption of cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services.
Rakuten Symphony and Cisco plan to provide solutions which will help mobile operators to compete more efficiently in the cloud era. The companies expect to address the industry requirement for huge transformation to cut down costs, improve agility and meet future technical, regulatory and environmental needs for sustainability.
Cisco executive vice president and mass-scale infrastructure group general manager Jonathan Davidson said: “We have proven what the benefits of an open, cloud-driven, 5G-powered mobile network can do to transform the way people connect to do more and get more of everything today.
“Together with Rakuten Symphony, we have the unique opportunity to offer global service providers an alternative to legacy RAN, with a turnkey option to transform their networks to be more intuitive and automated to support the ever-evolving needs for connectivity.”
The important components of the solutions include Cisco’s mobile, routing, switching, and automation portfolios and Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN, orchestration and the full suite of Symworld applications.
The partners intend to jointly validate and certify the solutions for service providers and provide systems that perform throughout the full lifecycle starting with the design.
Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin said: “We believe our collaboration with Cisco will bring something quite unique in the industry solving the industry’s current challenges when it comes to deploying new generations of networks.
“The principles of open architecture, cloud, virtualisation and automation are essential elements of the new networks that operators will be rolling out in the near future.
“Using open interfaces, virtualisation, cloud, and automation from Rakuten Symphony along with Cisco’s well established network footprint and offering will give telcos an opportunity to build and operate their networks in significantly better ways.”
In a separate development, Rakuten Symphony signed an agreement to acquire Robin.io, Silicon Valley-based cloud technology start-up.
The Japanese firm said that the addition of multi-cloud mobility, hyper automation, and orchestration capabilities of Robin.io to its portfolio enables the creation of highly effective, consistent high performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data centre.