Rakuten Symphony gets intimate with AWS

Japanese Open RAN platform provider Rakuten Symphony is making itself available on Amazon Web Services.

Rakuten Symphony likes to name all its products with ‘Sym’ as the first syllable. Accordingly its full platform is called Symworld and that’s what it’s striving to be fully supported by the biggest public cloud provider. The only surprise in this announcement is that it took so long since, according to Rakuten Symphony, Symworld ‘offers a total blueprint of cloud-native telecom operations with pre-integration of more than 110 cloud-native functions’.

For any operators already working with both Rakuten Symphony and AWS this will presumably be good news and the former will presumably be hoping the move makes its proposition more attractive to potential new customers. The press release doesn’t detail any other features and benefits associated with the move to AWS, other than the familiar refrains about the virtues of the public cloud.

“With Symworld platform, we have built the most robust, open and diverse operational stack for cloud-native networks,” said Tareq Amin, CEO at Rakuten Symphony. “Availability of Rakuten Symphony Symworld platform on AWS will offer telecom customers much needed agility, elasticity and security, as well as a seamless experience in leveraging the service offerings of both organizations.”

The announcement was made at MWC Las Vegas, at which Rakuten Symphony announced the general availability of its Symops Service Assurance suite of products, which are reassuringly ‘cloud agnostic’, as well as the general availability of its Symware distributed unit (DU) product, with plans to deploy 30,000 units across Rakuten Mobile’s network in Japan.

Rakuten Symphony prefers to describe itself more broadly as a cloud platform provider, so getting closer to the biggest public cloud player would appear to be a no-brainer. As we recently reflected, it’s getting harder for telcos to resist the siren call of the public cloud and this news will increase the volume further. But it’s not inevitable and the strategy is ultimately down to a given CTO’s interpretation of what ‘cloud native’ means in practice.

Get the latest news straight to your inbox. Register for the Telecoms.com newsletter here.