Rakuten Symphony President Sharad Sriwastawa has laid out his strategic plan for the coming year as well as highlighting how the organization has progressed in its efforts to “mature” following a high velocity start to life on the global telecom stage.
In a conversation with EMEA comms director James Dartnell on employee-facing series Inside Track, Sriwastawa outlined his 2025 vision for Rakuten Symphony and discussed the strategic changes he has implemented since taking on the role – alongside his duties as Rakuten Mobile co-CEO - in 2023. Sriwastawa outlined numerous areas in which he believes Rakuten Symphony holds competitive advantages, including its OSS portfolio, a wide variety of AI use-cases and access to the wider Rakuten ecosystem and associated partnership opportunities. The Inside Track session came as Rakuten Mobile announced that it had reached the 8 million subscriber milestone in Japan.
“When I took on the role, Rakuten Symphony had great vision and had already built great products,” Sriwastawa said. “It was similar to the 2019-2020 period with Rakuten Mobile - we built this new network with great technology, but the important thing became how we stabilized things after launching. We had to enhance our operational maturity.”
Having overseen this maturation phase, Rakuten Symphony is now looking to how it can create its next wave of disruptive telecom innovation, Sriwastawa said. “Over the last year we’ve focused on enhancing our operations, governance structure, products and software maturity,” he said. “In 2023 and 2024, we executed our plan of making things more reliable – next year I think we need to prioritise our innovation. Either we do it ourselves or we buy certain startups. Maybe in 2025 we will think about a few smaller additions.”
Sriwastawa went on to outline the main areas of focus and strategic change he has led since taking over as Rakuten Symphony President. “Delivering for our biggest customers has obviously been paramount - Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony go hand in hand and Rakuten Mobile’s success is Rakuten Symphony success. Anything that we implement in Rakuten Mobile can be used by Rakuten Symphony and vice versa. It allows us to show to the industry what we can accomplish - how we can increase rollout speed, automation levels, operational efficiency and how can we enhance synergy with the broader Rakuten Group ecosystem.
“In Germany, we need to successfully complete 1&1’s mobile network migration. Both those projects are critical to Rakuten Symphony’s success. Then it’s about BU-specific sales: instead of focusing on end-to-end deals, we started focusing on very specific product development. We’ve also been exploring how we can use our partners to sell products and enhance our go-to-market strategy.”
“Rakuten has been the only successful OTT player who has gone into connectivity, whereas all the legacy operators have typically been trying to go the other way. No other company has ecosystem data expertise combined with mobile operator insights. That gives us a unique advantage.”
Sriwastawa was bullish on Rakuten Symphony’s opportunities associated with being part of the Rakuten Group ecosystem which spans e-commerce, Fintech, digital content and more than 70 other internet services businesses. “No other company has our kind of dataset and expertise - how can we monetize this ecosystem given our experience in running a mobile operator? Rakuten has been the only successful OTT player who has gone into connectivity, whereas all the legacy operators have typically been trying to go the other way. That gives us a unique advantage. Any new mobile subscriber that joins the Rakuten ecosystem ends up using multiple services, and that increase in GMS across the Rakuten ecosystem is significant. Part of our 2025 strategy is how we can package our ecosystem or Group products and white label or sell them to other operators globally. The major equipment and software providers don’t have this - that could be huge. That puts Rakuten Symphony in a very unique position.”
“If operators want to go to the next generation, their only option is an OSS transformation.”
The conversation moved on to the ways that mobile network operators can accelerate their network transformation, and how Rakuten Symphony can support that journey. “Tier one operators are yet to see ROI from 5G,” Sriwastawa said. “Their focus is to reduce cost or monetize their network. Rakuten Symphony can do both – that’s a huge advantage for us. If operators want to go to the next generation, their only option is an OSS transformation. The next big thing in every industry is going to be AI. From AI-powered operational efficiency gains to reducing power consumption, Rakuten Symphony’s capabilities are tailored to meet the needs of operators that have faced challenges in getting ROI from 5G. We need to embark on this and use it efficiently and as fast as possible. It's about the entire mobile ecosystem and how networks can be monetized.”
Looking ahead, Rakuten Symphony is increasing its development of AI-driven solutions. By consolidating data into a unified platform, operators can leverage Rakuten’s advanced AI to enhance customer experiences and optimize network and business operations, Sriwastawa said. “Operators have to centralize their data for AI to be effective. We already do churn prediction and prevention using AI - how we are deploying sites, how we are using AI for operational efficiency or reducing power consumption. It's not just about the network, but all these algorithms which are done on top of it. Legacy operators don't have a data lake, which Rakuten Symphony does have. Their data is bifurcated. That opens the door for Symphony to sell a Data Lake as a solution.”
Global analytics firm Opensignal’s October 2024 Japan Mobile Experience Report confirmed that Rakuten Mobile users now experience the fastest 5G speeds in the country – the network won the 5G Download Speed award outright with a score of 176.5Mbps, and also defended the 5G Upload Speed award with a score of 27Mbps. While Rakuten Mobile remains the sole winner of Upload Speed Experience, the network’s target is to be “number one” in all the KPIs,” Sriwastawa said. “We’re also yet to start working on 6G. Towards Q4 2025 we'll start working on that.”
Open RAN software licensing will play a key role in Rakuten Symphony’s “mid-term” strategy. “Rakuten aims to support diverse chipsets and technologies, both of which will enhance Open RAN’s potential. We want to be a leader in that space.”
Rakuten Symphony will also look to extend its reach beyond telecom and will look to work more broadly with enterprises across industries. “With cloud, we are focusing both on telco and enterprise,” Sriwastawa said. “We are seeing good traction in both domains. Our OSS is a good fit for any industry that is distributed – our tools, including those for inventory and site management, have applications beyond telecom, opening doors for enterprise collaboration. These are industry-agnostic and can be used by anything which is distributed in nature and needs a centralized operation.”
“There is huge potential for both Rakuten Symphony and Rakuten Mobile. We are at the forefront of a technology revolution that is actually reshaping the entire telecom industry, - not just in Japan, but globally.”
Sriwastawa rounded off the conversation by answering various audience questions, including those around his ability to successfully manage top positions both at Japan’s newest mobile network operator and one of the world’s leading tech companies in the telecom industry. “I need to wear two hats,” Sriwastawa said. “I have known the Symphony team for six years, mainly through the lens of a vendor-customer relationship. The challenges of running a mobile network compared to a software company are quite different. With a mobile network, we need to maintain our performance every day or we risk losing customers. At Rakuten Symphony, the challenge is different. We have to work towards delivering complex software that helps our customers to solve operational problems and provide great experiences – that takes time.
“There is huge potential for Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony. We are at the forefront of a technology revolution that is actually reshaping the entire telecom industry, - not just in Japan, but globally. Our company mission is to disrupt the industry and democratize connectivity. I have huge confidence in our team to make that vision a reality.
“Our future is bright and our potential is limitless. now we are much more structured and focused. We know what we want to achieve.”
