Rakuten Symphony announces plans to acquire leading U.S.-based cloud technology company Robin.io to deliver highly integrated telco-cloud for mobile
The telco platform business Rakuten Symphony is again making headlines across the global mobile industry this week. On the opening day of MWC Barcelona 2022, the company announced an agreement to acquire leading Silicon Valley-based cloud technology start-up Robin.io.
“Together with Robin.io, other software companies and our internal team, we are making history. The new era is going to be different. With Robin.io, we are paving a new way for the future.”
Mickey Mikitani, Chairman and CEO, Rakuten Group
Rakuten Symphony is committed to reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting the outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. 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 high performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data center.
High performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data center
Headquartered in San Jose, California, Robin.io solutions are recognized across the industry for their innovation and reliability. The successful start-up provides cloud-native capabilities that automate deployment, scaling and lifecycle management of enterprise and 5G applications on Kubernetes.
At a reception event hosted by Robin.io in collaboration with Rakuten Symphony at MWC Barcelona 2022, Rakuten Group Chairman and CEO Mickey Mikitani commented, “Together with Robin.io, other software companies and our internal team, we are making history. The new era is going to be different. With Robin.io, we are paving a new way for the future.”
“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.”
Tareq Amin, CEO, Rakuten Symphony.
Robin.io’s core technology uses application bundles and application pipelines, which are automated through patented infrastructure and application-topology awareness technology. The company allows developers and platform engineers to deploy and easily manage data and network-centric applications — including big data, NoSQL and 5G — independent of underlying infrastructure resources.
“Edge cloud requirements are unique and critical as mobile operators transition to 5G: The next era of digital experience requires another level of performance, responsiveness and consistency that enables telecom operator and enterprise transformation to be safely accelerated while creating a platform to support the next ten years of experiences,” shared Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony.
“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,” Amin continued. “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.”
“We believe Robin.io’s customers will hugely benefit from the synergies of cloud-native technology innovations from Robin.io, and the open competitive infrastructure solutions and global scale of Rakuten Symphony.”
Partha Seetala, CEO, Riobin.io
A history of collaboration
Collaboration between Rakuten and Robin.io has already been underway for more than two years, since Rakuten Mobile leveraged Robin.io in production for the Japan deployment of the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network.* Understanding the high performance requirements of mobile radio and network applications, combined with the need for financial efficiency and automated operation for scale, enabled Rakuten Mobile and Robin.io to create a complete cloud-native offering to deliver and manage the most demanding applications of this and the next era.
Now, Rakuten Symphony and Robin.io are coming together to further accelerate and strengthen the complete end-to-end automated cloud offering for customers across the globe.
“I am delighted that Robin.io’s technology innovations over the last several years will now get a much bigger canvas to lead the vision for cloud-native transformation for the industry. Our vision to deliver simple to use, easy to deploy hyperscale automation is very well aligned,” commented Partha Seetala, CEO of Robin.io.
Seetala continued, “We believe Robin.io’s customers will hugely benefit from the synergies of cloud-native technology innovations from Robin.io, and the open competitive infrastructure solutions and global scale of Rakuten Symphony. This is indeed an exciting phase for us as we work together to bring a much larger ecosystem together to deliver higher value for our customers globally.”
Following the acquisition, Seetala will take up the position of President of the Unified Cloud business unit of Rakuten Symphony.
With over 70 patents in the cloud-native technology space, Robin.io offers a highly differentiated and comprehensive product portfolio. Adding Robin.io’s portfolio for cloud-native deployment, lifecycle management and orchestration allows Rakuten Symphony to deploy highly reliable, flexible, scalable, secure and resilient mobile networks built on the principles of open interfaces, virtualization and interoperability.
Together, the combined companies will also be able to deliver industry leading solutions for various traditional enterprise opportunities in the areas of enterprise applications, data management, cloud and virtualization.
*Editors’s note: For a large scale commercial mobile network (as of October 1, 2019). Research: Stella Associa
