Rakuten Symphony has appointed experienced telecom and IT executive Sanjay Saraswat as Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of its RAN Business Unit. He is based in the Rakuten Symphony Bengaluru office and reports to Anil Sawkar, President of the RAN BU.
Sanjay brings vast experience to the role from a career that has traversed various global markets, including the United Kingdom – where he earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge - Canada and India, where he has held a number of executive roles, including Chief Information Officer of Reliance Globalcom. Sanjay also established RAN solutions provider Airspan’s R&D centers in Mumbai and Bangalore, transforming them into key operational hubs in his capacity as VP and Head of R&D for India.
“I am very excited to bring my experience in both telecom and IT to enhance Rakuten Symphony’s RAN value proposition,” Sanjay said. “For many years, I have been impressed with Rakuten Symphony’s highly impressive track record of in-house innovation, a legacy that I hope to continue in my role by developing solutions that benefit mobile network operators today and in the future.”
Sanjay also put on record his admiration for Rakuten Symphony’s plans to launch its Open RAN licensing program. “I believe that the model has the potential to be very disruptive,” he said. “It is a unique concept by telecom industry standards – it shows our clear intent of taking the lead about introducing positive disruption and new economic models to telecom.”
Sanjay highlighted the importance of the evolving practices and skillsets that Rakuten Symphony’s RAN Business Unit is looking to introduce.
“Traditional methodologies in R&D are changing, as are the skills needed in the RAN space,” he said. “There's a greater push towards automating the human-intensive aspects so that our intelligence can be channelled into other efforts – this is something we hope to channel. Rakuten Symphony also hopes to introduce new, cutting-edge skills into the RAN Business Unit around AI-ML specialization, mobile network architecture and algorithm development and I look forward supporting that evolution and in turn growing our portfolio.”
