Rakuten Symphony hit MWC Barcelona 2022 with a bang, including its second major acquisition in six months and open radio access network (RAN) deals with AT&T, Cisco, Nokia, and Qualcomm.

The standalone company recently formed by the Japanese e-commerce giant to push its open RAN architecture into more networks around the world kicked the week off with an agreement to acquire Robin.io. The San Jose-based software company offers cloud-native Kubernetes orchestration and automation, including storage, lifecycle management, and other services. It also played a role in Rakuten Mobile’s fully virtualized open RAN in Japan.

Robin.io’s technology will join other services and applications in Symworld, the recently rebranded Rakuten Communications Platform, including the recently acquired Altiostar and Rakuten’s various open RAN technology assets. It’s a collection of the same tools and functions Rakuten used to build and operate its network in Japan that it’s now selling as a service to other operators. 

Robin.io CEO Partha Seetala joins Rakuten Symphony to lead the company’s Unified Cloud business unit. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin, who was recently promoted to the same job at Rakuten Mobile, said the company plans to continue investing in Robin.io’s technology and products. 

“We learned the hard way not all clouds are alike. The complexity of telecom workloads, especially radio access, require predictability that public cloud hasn’t yet experienced. That is the reason for our acquisition of Robin.io. As we take our technology global, this is the architecture that service providers and enterprises deploying 5G will require,” Amin said during a press event at MWC Barcelona, according to a transcript. 

Amin and his colleagues also demonstrated Symworld and the various pieces of software Rakuten Mobile uses to power its network. The platform includes a RAN intelligent controller, open RAN functions and services, security, service assurance, and operations and business support services (OSS/BSS).

“The promise of 5G saving telecom is a false hope,” Amin said. “As technology has advanced, the process of architecture and evolution in telecom has remained the same. … We made a choice to do something different.”

The company’s largest customer to date comes in the form of another greenfield operator, Germany’s 1&1 Drillisch, which inked a deal with Rakuten to build a 5G open RAN. However, additional partnerships announced this week indicate the company is now making inroads with industry stalwarts.

AT&T inked a deal with Rakuten Symphony to bolster and deploy its Site Manager and RAN Commander to quicken the design and workflows of wireless and wired networks. The companies said they also plan to develop and introduce new services for other operators to use.

The deal will expand and improve the transformation of AT&T’s network and others around the world with a “new architecture stack with less manual touches,” AT&T EVP and CTO Andre Fuetsch said in a statement. 

Cisco, a partner of Rakuten Mobile’s since its early days, turned to Rakuten Symphony to create a joint go-to-market model to help operators modernize network infrastructure, including the deployment of cloud-native software and mobile networks based on open RAN.

“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,” Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, said in a statement.

Nokia, another longtime partner of Rakuten, earned itself a starring role in Rakuten Symphony as the sole vendor for multiple mobile core products. All of Nokia’s cloud-native core software will be available on the Symworld platform for operators to select and install into live networks, the companies said.

Finally, in the week prior to the telecom industry’s largest annual event, Rakuten landed a deal with Qualcomm to develop a 5G radio unit with massive MIMO and distributed units. 

Rakuten Symphony recently expanded operations to Britain, France, and Germany, bringing its on-the-ground footprint to Japan, the U.S, Singapore, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.