Rakuten Symphony named long-time industry technology executive Amit Bhardwaj as president of its radio access network (RAN) business unit, a move that comes as the broader RAN industry continues to evolve.

Bhardwaj is based in the U.S. and will oversee Tokyo-based Rakuten Symphony’s global RAN Business Unit. This includes working with telecom operators on their deployment of cloud-native open RAN architectures.

Bhardwaj previously served a short stint as SVP for RAN and device engineering at Boost Mobile, which is in the process of migrating from a facilities-based operator to a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model. Prior to that, Bhardwaj spent 16 years at Ericsson, culminating with a position as VP and CTO for the vendor’s work with T-Mobile US.

“We are excited to welcome Amit to the team as we accelerate our mission to transform the mobile industry,” Sharad Sriwastawa, representative director and president of Rakuten Symphony, noted in a statement. “Amit’s comprehensive experience in network infrastructure and his forward-thinking approach make him the ideal leader to guide our RAN Business Unit as we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with open RAN and cloud-native technology.”

Bhardwaj replaces Anil Sawkar, who led Rakuten Symphony’s RAN Business Unit since its founding in 2021. Sawkar is moving to an advisory role with the company.

The hiring comes a month after Rakuten Symphony lost Partha Seetala, who was chief AI officer for the vendor’s cloud division. Seetala had previously founded Robin IO, which Rakuten Symphony acquired in 2022.

Open RAN challenges remain

The leadership change also comes as the broader RAN market continues its years-long march toward more open architectures.

Rakuten’s telecom efforts began as a mobile operator in Japan attempting to break into that country’s nationwide market that had been dominated by three giants in NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI. Its initial move was based around an open network architecture, with its initial service launched based on an MVNO model.

Rakuten’s open architecture efforts included considerable work that included a number of segment acquisitions that resulted in the forming of its Symphony division in late 2021. That division was tasked with expanding its open RAN architecture into more networks around the world.

Those efforts have seen Rakuten Symphony ranked as one of the market’s leading providers of cloud-native platforms to telecom operators. However, those accolades remain subdued due to slow market growth.

Dell’Oro Group recently revised its near-term open RAN revenue expectations downward due to ongoing technical and investment challenges, though it did note that most of that downward trajectory was tied to adjacent cloud RAN and multivendor open RAN issues.

“Openness, intelligence, automation, and virtualization remain key pillars in the next-generation RAN platforms,” Dell’Oro Group VP of RAN Market Research Stefan Pongratz wrote. “But the adoption curves vary. The likelihood that open RAN, cloud RAN, and multivendor RAN will play a major role in the second half of 5G and from the start with 6G is likely, less likely, and unlikely, respectively.”

SDxCentral looked at many of those open RAN issues in our recent Open RAN Supplement.