The companies announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding at Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona in a move that Cisco claimed would build upon the success of Rakuten’s industry-first cloud-native network architecture. The partnership will see Cisco predominantly work with subsidiary Rakuten Symphony, which the company has said it created to “help global service providers prepare the internet for the future”.
Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president at Cisco, said: “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 duo reported that they will aim to develop software-defined solutions based on automated, agile, high-performance infrastructure. Key elements of these solutions will see the integration of Cisco’s mobile, routing and automation portfolios with Rakuten’s O-RAN, orchestration and Symworld applications.
Tareq Amin, chief executive of Rakuten Symphony, added: “I am very pleased to see both organisations come together and combine strengths. 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, virtualization and automation are essential elements of the new networks that operators will be rolling out in the near future. Using open interfaces, virtualization, 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.”