Rakuten and Intel: Reinventing the mobile network for the data-centric era

Optimism is a key requirement for all technology breakthroughs. Optimism is the ability to tune out the naysayers and imagine what’s possible. It’s the ability to abandon how things should be done, and invent how things could be done…better, faster and more cost effectively. It’s this spirit of optimistic invention that drove Intel’s collaboration with Rakuten to build the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native mobile network.

When Rakuten made the bold decision to launch a mobile service, they looked for a partner with the experience, technology and optimism to help them build a totally new kind of wireless network – one ready to reliably deliver 5G data rates with the flexibility to adapt quickly to new innovation, delivered through an agile and cost-efficient cloud-native network infrastructure foundation.

As a global internet services company, Rakuten saw first-hand the exponential growth of data, the emergence of artificial intelligence and the convergence of communications and computing. With these trends in mind, they decided to break from legacy wireless network infrastructure and create a data-centric, cloud-native network. We are thrilled the Rakuten team chose Intel as its technology provider and co-architect on this ambitious project – not only for our technology, but also our culture.

First, let’s talk about our technology. Many people still think of Intel as the microprocessor inside a PC…and we are! But, today’s Intel delivers the technology required to move, store and process data faster and smarter whether on a PC in a home or business, on a server in a data center or the networks in between.

Rakuten is building a fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network using high-performance Intel Xeon processors and our FPGA-based accelerators that provide greater agility and flexibility. With Intel data centric technology at the center of this novel network, Rakuten can scale outside Japan and offer reliable, fast and affordable service to its customers at a lower cost. The company can also deliver new services faster because cloud networks offer a richer, standards-based development environment compared to legacy, proprietary wireless networks.

The other ingredient to our collective success on this project is a culture of invention and optimism. At Intel, we play an important role in our customers’ success. We know our customers rely on our technology as a foundation for their next big inventions. We are up to this challenge and not only that…we revel in it.

We’re honored that Intel CEO, Bob Swan, will join Rakuten CEO Mickey Mikitani on stage for a fireside chat at the Rakuten Optimism 2019 conference next week. This talk will touch on our collaboration, and why 5G and the ‘cloudification’ of the network is a technology inflection that will accelerate and create demand for data and new, real-time mobile services at global scale.

Intel co-founder Robert Noyce once famously said: “Don’t be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful.” This optimistic advice continues to inspire us today. It also aptly describes our collaboration with Rakuten to deliver a first-of-its-kind intelligent mobile network that will power its business into the future.

For more about Rakuten Optimism 2019, visit here.