Rakuten Symphony is welcoming telecom industry veteran Udai Kanukolanu to its senior executive team. He will take the lead with the company’s Sales and Marketing divisions and support international deployments of its transformational telecom solutions as global head of sales.
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Udai brings more than 25 years of telecom experience to the company, having previously worked in senior roles at Dell, Ericsson and Motorola.
“Over two-and-a-half decades I've been fortunate to gain a deep understanding of operator priorities and challenges and support them through their transformation journey. I understand how to bring new technology into the operator transformation narrative and have been working with existing and new operators who are now looking at building networks a completely different way with Open RAN, cloud and automation/AI.
“Rakuten Symphony’s technology is impactful in the transformation of the telecom industry.”
Udai is joining Rakuten Symphony at a critical time when the global telecom is realizing a total transformation of business and operating models. The envy of most mobile operators is the agility and flexible cost structures of the enterprise world – but this is the industry transformation Rakuten Symphony is making a reality, today.
“When I look at the telecom industry today, operators are taking their need for transformation seriously. Looking at Rakuten Mobile in Japan as an operator benchmark, the time is right for Rakuten Symphony to leverage our technologies and knowhow to intercept that industry transformation and disruption opportunity.”
“Rakuten Symphony’s technology assets, deployed on live networks in Japan, the United States and Europe, are extremely exciting - we have the right technology for the transformation taking place in the telecom industry today. The transformation is also about operators having greater predictive capabilities to address what's happening on the network. It’s about moving from being reactive to predictive. AI is significantly influencing that transformation and Rakuten Symphony has a phenomenal set of assets realizing this transformation today.”
“Mobile operators do not have the agility or the flexible cost structures of the enterprise world – but that is a change that we would like to make a reality.”
As mobile network operators strive to overcome decades of legacy complexity, Udai is understanding of the need for prudent decision-making, but believes the industry needs to collectively strive for faster and more productive outcomes.
“Mobile operators are traditionally very conservative when it comes to transformation. This is a highly regulated industry, and unlike an enterprise or less regulated industries where you can accept change and transform quickly, mobile operators cannot afford any service disruption to customers. I want to take mobile operators on that journey of industry transformation.”
