Rakuten Symphony is a standout player in telecom because of its unique ability to understand and solve customer problems, the President of its OSS Business Unit (OSS BU) has said.
In the second edition of ‘Inside Track’, the new employee-facing live series hosted by comms director James Dartnell, Rahul Atri outlined the importance of understanding customer needs, why Rakuten has a strong track record of cultivating leaders and why “AI-washing” will not deliver value to mobile network operators.
Atri returned to Rakuten Group as Rakuten Symphony OSS BU President in 2023 having previously played a central role in deploying Rakuten Mobile's network - one based on an autonomous, cloud-native, end-to-end network architecture. He now leads a division of over 1,000 employees – Rakuten Symphony’s largest BU, the majority of which comprises engineers.
The Inside Track session kicked off with Atri emphasising the telecom industry’s fascination with the Rakuten telecom story. Rakuten Symphony’s experience in operating Rakuten Mobile’s network gives the organisation an ability to put “ourselves in the customer's shoes and help solve their problems with technology,” he said.
“They want to learn from us in terms of how we created things and how we solve problems. What customers love about us is we are not just there to sell more boxes and software. We own their problem and solve that end-to-end. We've been successful at doing that.
“I've been in multiple conversations with customers where they're not initially able to articulate some of their challenges, but we’re able to tell them a story that shows we’ve gone through the same journey and how we overcame that challenge. We have a product platform which is run across the lifecycle of Rakuten Mobile. I think that's our differentiator - that’s extremely helpful to customers.”
Atri highlighted how Rakuten Symphony’s unique approach to solving these problems has supported one of the world’s largest brownfield operators in retiring 15 legacy applications, with more to come. “That’s big – they’ve got so many technologies as part of their operation,” he said. If you want to work with brownfield operators and solve their problems, you need to have a culture in which you continuously innovate.”
The second episode of Inside Track hosted two audience participation polls, the second of which revealed an eye-opening result - 70% of audience members agreed that the most important factor in building innovative and effective products and solutions is through a culture that enables employees to be creative - and to fail – a sentiment with which Atri strongly agreed.
“I want alchemists in my team - people who can connect the dots from what the customer is looking for to what the product should be. I think it's also very important in today's world to be a storyteller if you want to climb up the ladder faster. My advice is to be a ‘kid’ - be curious about everything. Don’t be scared of being judged. The more you experience you gain - especially in telecom – the more you build walls and a safety net around you. Learning never stops.”
Atri went on to highlight the importance of successfully unifying experts across UX, product management and quality assurance teams to deliver products and experiences that deliver value. “Whoever is working on products, whether it is the designer who creates the beautiful layouts and UX, the quality assurance team who really stress test the product, and developers who write the code – they all need to understand what the essence of the product is for the customer, how they're going to use it. In the OSS BU we know whatever code each employee is writing and where that is being used, how it looks, what customer uses it, and where it can be improved.”
Understanding user intent is fundamental to Rakuten’s approach to developing AI services that can make a tangible difference to mobile network operators, Atri said. “We focus a lot on the ROI of our products - we don't want to just wash them with AI, to say we have a chatbot enabled. What customers really need is more insight and value. Today, anyone can talk to an AI platform. What we are working on is how to convert this into a mechanism where the tool can take care of the rest. We want to become a platform which can make a network programmable - where you can convey your intent to the platform, and the platform listens to you and takes care of the rest, whether it is scaling out a new application, deploying an edge site, reconfiguring itself or deploying networks to support slicing. The platform needs to understand whoever is behind the screen – whether it is a NOC engineer, a salesperson or the CEO - and what they are specifically asking.”
The conversation concluded with Atri sharing his take on Rakuten’s strong track record of developing leaders internally – a culture that he himself has directly experienced. “Rakuten is the place where curiosity gets its wings,” he said. “Rakuten Symphony has been the disruptor. We've been the challenger. I think that comes from the leadership and the DNA we carry. We are a big company, but we have the heart and soul of a startup.”
Atri is now striving to continue this positive example by increasing the number of female leaders within the OSS BU. He gave a nod to Subha Srinivasan, Rakuten Symphony’s Global Head of Customer Excellence, as an example to other employees. “I’m trying to increase the number of female mentors in our organization, and Subha is a great example of that. What we have seen is that female leaders are often faster, more agile, more complete.”
Atri’s Inside Track episode garnered extensive audience interest, and he rounded off the discussion by addressing an audience question – how can tech specialists transition to becoming business leaders without a business background, and how should they start that journey? “Read every day,” Atri said. “Then spend time going out of your comfort zone. When you don't know something, be bullish and ask as many questions as you need to. You need to be boundary-less, own problems and find a way to solve them, despite whatever challenges are in the way.”
