Matt Kapko | EditorMay 1, 2020 4:37 PM
With much of the foundation now set for Rakuten Mobile’s aspiration to become a fourth nationwide mobile operator in Japan, the company has its sights set on expansion outside of Japan. It hired Azita Arvani to be GM of Rakuten Mobile in the Americas, and has assembled a platform to sell packaged and customizable services to meet the needs of other operators.
“The dream that we have is to tell many of the existing telecom operators, ‘look, take two years of the journey that we had, it was not simple, it was not easy to build our organization, it was not easy to build the right skill sets. Maybe you should not repeat the same mistakes,’” Amin said.
Rakuten Cloud Platform is like an app store for telecommunications network infrastructure that enables operators to click, purchase, and deploy services in a matter of weeks. “We’re very interested to find the right partners and the right opportunity to take the Rakuten Cloud Platform and ship it as an entire telco pod that has the entire technology, including by the way new technology stacks that we have built and will be building for both OSS and BSS,” he said.
“We think it’s a compelling proposition, to take all these lessons learned in Tokyo, package it, and have a technology stack that is completely open and allow others to help us make it credible and validate its use case outside of Japan,” Amin added.
Rakuten is also making investments to aid this effort, but it’s taking a relatively tempered approach. “We don’t need to spend billions of U.S. dollars acquiring you know, I call it maybe a traditional technology software stack. But we are looking and always looking opportunistically in the areas where I believe we could make the biggest impact,” he said.
Those areas, in order of biggest potential impact, include: OSS and BSS, orchestration, cloud infrastructure, and the entire containers layer. The company has entered into an agreement to acquire a company that specializes in OSS and BSS because, as Amin describes it, that is the “heart of transformation in any operator” and the “systems that exist today are in desperate need of transformation.” He declined to name the company, but said it will be publicly announced later this month.
As for the Rakuten Cloud Platform, Amin is confident that it will reach maturity in June “with key telco workloads that are 100% cloud native, completely orchestrated, are elastic, and have all the auto-healing functions enabled.”
Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and Amin expected that going into the project, but “we have no option and no choice but to make this successful” and “we are really, really close,” he said.
www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/...twork-challenges/2020/05/
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