High-profile Rakuten executive Tareq Amin has left the Japanese operator and platform provider, taking with him a legacy of leading that firm’s innovative open radio access network (RAN) development and deployment.

In a message posted to his LinkedIn profile, Amin stated a desire to spend more time with his family. “I am eager to channel my energy and attention toward creating cherished moments and nurturing bonds that matter most in life – my children,” he wrote.

Amin added that he was “excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and the chance to make a difference in the world once again,” and that he would “embrace new challenges and continue to strive for innovation and disruption in the industry.”

Amin held several roles at Rakuten at the time of his departure. He was CEO and CTO of its mobile services division, CEO of Rakuten Symphony, and group CTO and chief architect officer for the broader Rakuten Group.

Rakuten Group Chairman and CEO Mickey Mikitani was named CEO and chairman of Symphony following Amin’s departure, with Sharad Sriwastawa tapped as president of that division.

Amin has been a long-time backer of breaking up the legacy RAN stack, dating back to his days at India-based operator Reliance Jio. He joined Rakuten as CTO in mid-2018, spearheading that operator’s innovative open RAN-based network plans.

Specifically, Amin headed Rakuten’s mobile division, which launched in early 2020. The carrier entered the densely penetrated Japanese mobile market as a fourth competitor against established rivals NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank.

Rakuten Mobile, led by Amin, took a different tack by deploying a virtualized network architecture to support its initial 4G LTE and eventual 5G service. The network launch included several high-profile technical challenges, but eventually hit an operating level of maturity.

Network monitoring firm Opensignal recently lauded the carrier’s network performance, though the operator continues to struggle financially.

Amin also headed up Rakuten’s Symphony division, which started in late 2021. Symphony was initially focused on expanding its open RAN architecture into more networks around the world.

The division housed the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) and Rakuten’s various open RAN technology assets and services. The RCP platform has since been rebranded as Symworld following its acquisition of Robin IO.

Amin recently stated that the Symphony open RAN system was near software feature parity with already-deployed network systems. This is important for operators as they look to further migrate their current networks toward an open RAN architecture.

Amin said this is a “very big inflection point for us where we will be at feature parity with all legacy software features that exist in brownfield operators. This is really very exciting, and this is what we’ve been focused on over the last year to enable brownfield deployment in commercial environments.”

The executive highlighted Rakuten’s extensive operating support system (OSS) advances, which include deployments across 11 customers and more than 100,000 platform users tapping into its more than 17 products. That depth generated $76 million in sales for Q1, which was nearly 15% more than it reported the previous year.

Despite a broad desire by operators to open up the RAN ecosystem, the market’s ongoing position as a subsection of the broader RAN market has remained a hurdle as operator timelines are impacting deployment and market dynamics.

Analysys Mason recently cited an outside influence from operators like Rakuten Mobile in Japan and Dish Network in the United States. However, both are greenfield operators with limited overall market power.

LightCounting Market Research came to a similar conclusion, noting a handful of open RAN operators – Dish, Rakuten Mobile and some Rakuten Symphony customers – “kept the market flat year over year and produced double-digit sequential growth.”

From a vendor perspective, Dell’Oro Group has pointed to Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu, Rakuten Symphony and Mavenir as the top open RAN revenue generators over the past several quarters.

Amin stated that the Symphony business exited Q1 with more than $3 billion in its sales pipeline, which was down from the $4 billion he touted the previous quarter.

Analysts cited Amin’s forthright nature in discussing the trials and tribulations of the open RAN ecosystem.

“He always provided good insights into what was working and not working when it came to the adoption of open RAN,” Daryl Schoolar, director and analyst at Recon Analytics, wrote in an email to SDxCentral. “While other companies are trialing open RAN, few are as transparent or forthcoming as Tareq.”

However, Schoolar noted that Amin’s legacy at Rakuten has been “mixed,” with challenges remaining for both the mobile and Symphony businesses.

“In my opinion, he has done an excellent job in educating the market and helping to move forward the commercialization of open RAN,” Schoolar wrote. “When it comes to leading Rakuten as a mobile operator or technology vendor, that is a different topic. No matter what the underlying technology Rakuten is using, it is always difficult to break into a mature market like Japan as a mobile network operator. The challenges there go well beyond the types of radio access network interfaces that are being used.”

Symphony – due to its market focus – also remains challenged.

“As a technology vendor to other mobile operators, success there appears very limited with Rakuten being the largest customer of Symphony,” Schoolar wrote. “It takes years, and multiple factors, for a vendor to gain solid ground as a supplier to mobile operators. And it is very unusual for a company that starts out as a service provider to pivot to being a technology vendor. It is in this area Tareq appears to have limited success. It will be interesting to watch what happens to Symphony with Tareq gone.”

Schoolar did add that he expects Amin to “reappear in the industry.”