Rakuten Symphony hones pitch to be one cloud for all telco needs

In the bar area of the Novotel in Hammersmith, a waiter expertly navigates tables and chairs as he steers a tray cluttered with drinks toward some thirsty guests. The drinks come in all looks, sizes and flavors, but the tray provides a single horizontal platform to efficiently convey the lot. This is essentially what Rakuten Cloud – whose representatives met with Light Reading at the London hotel – wants to do for the cornucopia of network and IT applications that telcos and others consume.

The name might be new, but the mission is not. Known as Japan's preeminent e-commerce player, Rakuten snapped up the company that it today calls Rakuten Cloud with its takeover in early 2022 of Robin.io, a startup dabbling in Kubernetes and other Internet arcana. It quickly became a part of Rakuten Symphony, the vending machine for network software and other in-house tools. With the rebrand to Rakuten Cloud, it has left behind names reminiscent of superhero sidekicks and classical music scores and seemingly gained more purpose.

Today, operators virtualizing their networks often complain about vertical silos, where each application is tethered to its own infrastructure platform. This would be worse than forcing our Novotel waiter to use a separate tray for each type of drink. "It is completely inefficient because you have siloed supply chain, siloed repair, siloed specialist knowledge, siloed warehousing, siloed returns," Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony's chief marketing officer, told Light Reading.

What operators increasingly say they want is to be more like the real-life waiter and use one platform to host everything. But it's easier done in hospitality. Major developers like Ericsson and Nokia previously designed applications to run on their own cloud platforms and made a "full stack" pitch to customers. Not all those customers are averse to this philosophy. And there are numerous companies now trying to play that horizontal role, from the hyperscalers to Rakuten Cloud to the European telcos keen on DIY.

Throwing Red Hat out of the ring?

What, then, makes Rakuten Cloud so special? One is the experience it has gained with Rakuten Mobile in Japan, perhaps the world's largest greenfield mobile network (the only realistic contender is Dish Network in the US) and arguably the most extensively deployed open and virtualized radio access network (RAN) anywhere. This puts Rakuten Cloud ahead of rivals like IBM-owned Red Hat, with its similar pitch, says Vivek Chadha, Rakuten Symphony's global head of telco cloud, who concedes that Red Hat enjoys a lead in other enterprise sectors where it has been active for many years.

In the Japan example, of course, Rakuten is pairing its cloud platform with SymRAN, the RAN software it gained with its earlier takeover of Altiostar in 2021. A similar rollout is now happening in Germany with 1&1, Rakuten Symphony's flagship customer. But Rakuten Cloud is open to supporting third-party RAN software, and is able to do it, says Chadha. "The ambition is to be multivendor and vendor-agnostic, and we are actively collaborating with multiple providers, whether core providers or other network function providers. And the same goes for the standard IT applications, as well."

This is an important differentiator, Chadha insists, because of efforts by others "to form rather close relationships with one or two specific vendors." The comments follow the big tie-up last year between Nokia and Red Hat. Nokia had previously sold its core network applications with in-house platforms. After the deal's announcement, it promised to abandon all internal platform development and make Red Hat its "primary" partner, moving some 350 employees to IBM.

Chadha, nevertheless, downplays the ramifications for Rakuten. "It is only for the core, and it is not exclusive," he said. Nokia notably has highlighted work it is doing with other platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), although Rakuten has not so far been identified as a partner in either trials or commercial deployments.

Rakuten can more easily promote vendor agnosticism on the core network side, where it does not have an internally developed equivalent to SymRAN. With 1&1 in Germany, applications built by Mavenir are hosted by Rakuten Cloud. In Japan, the idea under previous management was to switch from a Cisco 4G core on Red Hat – Rakuten Mobile's original choices – to an NEC 5G core on Robin.io, today's Rakuten Cloud. But this migration has not happened, said Sharad Sriwastawa, CEO of Rakuten's Mobile and Symphony businesses, when he met Light Reading at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC).

Sriwastawa blamed that on a decision not to press ahead quickly with a rollout of standalone 5G, the version of the technology that replaces the old 4G core. Yet it means at least two platforms are in service at Mobile – Red Hat and Rakuten Cloud. And Rakuten also still uses a Linux-based operating system (OS) from Red Hat, despite saying it would switch to Rocky Linux, an alternative it deemed more genuinely "open source."

"They [Rakuten] went and they bought Robin.io, they bought Altiostar and they tried to put somebody else's Linux in there – aka Rocky – and they're still running real-time RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] in that system. And they're still buying our technology and our support," said Ian Hood, Red Hat's chief technologist for global service providers, at MWC.

By contrast, Rakuten does claim to have made progress on the migration of Nokia's Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology from CloudBand Application Manager – one of the internal platforms Nokia put on death row following its Red Hat tie-up – to Rakuten Cloud.

Extreme automation

Beyond Rakuten Mobile, arguably the biggest challenge is standing out from the platform crowd as application developers identify priorities and operators make their choices. Chadha is relatively sanguine about the hyperscalers, regarding them more as prospective (and established) partners than competitors. "We are an on-premises, cloud-native software provider," he said. "The choice then for operators is, do they want to perform as consistently on bare metal on premises as they do on AWS or Azure." Google Cloud, he points out, already uses Rakuten's software-defined storage controller.

Still, telcos including AT&T and Etisalat (of the United Arab Emirates) are deploying core network software on a Microsoft platform called Nexus, pitched as part of a "hybrid" cloud offer that includes public and private elements. In Europe, telcos such as the UK's BT and Germany's Deutsche Telekom have built their own platforms instead of taking one off-the-shelf from a third party.

Chadha clearly thinks many of these bespoke efforts do not measure up well. He also blames an unwillingness to embrace alternatives on an "understandable" telco reluctance "to give up and sweep under the rug" what has already been done, along with the investments that were made to do it. Many operators, however, are "watching and waiting," he says, partly because of slow vendor progress on the move from virtual to cloud-native network functions.

What sounds especially compelling about Rakuten Cloud is the level of automation built in from the outset. Its orchestrator allows it to ship "blank" blades – with no OS installed – and then configure these in data centers, without human intervention, for specific requirements, according to Chadha. "Everything we do from initial install through to automation of upgrades always has a blueprint that is machine readable, and that is how overnight we can upgrade thousands of basestations, because it works in parallel," said Hollingworth. As costs bubble, and revenues stay drinks-tray flat, many operators will be all ears.