Rakuten Symphony, which is currently ramping up its European mobile services footprint with new or expanded units in the UK, France and Germany, has acquired key 5G and edge vendor Robin.io.
Robin.io is a leading player in the cloud-native mobile services market and the evolving Open RAN mobile networking space. Open RAN allows service providers to use a mix and match approach to delivering new services, instead of relying on more expensive one-stop solutions from the likes of Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei.
“The addition of Robin.io’s multi-cloud mobility, hyper automation and orchestration capabilities to the Rakuten Symphony portfolio allows the creation of highly efficient, consistent and high- performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data centre,” said Japan-headquartered Rakuten.
News of the acquisition came out of the blue, as Robin.io is currently marketing recently launched Open RAN solutions at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which opened today.
Rakuten Mobile already uses Robin.io for its technology in its Japanese mobile network, which is one of Robin.io's key customers in the wild, and used extensively as a reference design.
One consideration after the acquisition will be whether mobile operators and other service providers will be so keen on a non-independent mobile services provider, particularly when it comes to sharing international project and deployment plans.
Then again, if the technology is proving good, that may not make any difference in most cases. Robin.io competes against companies like VMware and the telecoms units in both Dell Technologies and HPE.
“Robin.io’s cloud capability is proven to be effective for the most demanding workloads in mobile and we believe it will allow Rakuten Symphony to safely accelerate cloud-native transformation for our customers and prepare the industry for the future,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony. “We plan to continue to invest into Robin.io’s cloud-native portfolio of products, to further advance our capabilities and offer the most advanced and highly-integrated cloud platform mobile operators demand.”
“Robin.io’s technology innovations over the last several years will now get a much bigger canvas to paint the vision for cloud-native transformation for the industry,” said Partha Seetala, CEO of Robin.io. “Our customers will hugely benefit from the open competitive infrastructure solutions and global scale of Rakuten Symphony.”
Following the acquisition, Seetala will take up the position of president of the unified cloud business unit of Rakuten Symphony. The value of the acquisition has not been disclosed.
