Japan’s Rakuten tops in Open RAN, Gen AI solutions to boost growth in India

In an exclusive interaction with India Inc., India CEO Sunil Gopinath said that India, along with other global markets, continues to offer opportunities and revenue potential compared to the investments required for legacy networks, and the solution Program can save costs. Mint.

“We are talking to many customers in other parts of the world such as Africa. Even if you are a traditional network, we can still provide a lot of functionality in the high-level software stack. Many customers have purchased our software and we are in discussions with many other customers . So I think India and other regions are in the discussion from that perspective,” he said in response to a question about whether the Open RAN opportunity cycle has passed.

Rakuten Symphony, a unit of Rakuten Group, has deployed around 5,000 femtocells (small, low-power cellular base stations that improve network coverage and signal quality in areas with weak cellular signals) in Bharti Airtel’s 4G network by 2021 ). Since then, the company has not made significant inroads in the Indian market.

“There are a lot of greenfield customers. For example, Germany’s 1&1 has launched a 5G network and is powered by Rakuten as a telco. There are many customers who want cost savings from an operating expense perspective and since you have to invest in a lot of hardware, we can do that better than any Traditional solutions are about 30 to 40 percent cheaper,” he added.

Gopinath did not comment on Rakuten’s ongoing discussions with Indian telcos, but noted that Rakuten’s SixthSense unit’s solution, called Observability, is available to telecom service providers across regions.

Mint It was reported in March 2024 that Rakuten Symphony had begun discussions with the three major operators Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea to deploy small base stations based on Open RAN technology.

Open RAN technology helps telecom operators procure hardware and software from different suppliers, thereby ending dependence on a single supplier. Unlike Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, which opted for traditional 5G technology from Nokia and Ericsson, Vodafone Idea is the only operator considering using Open RAN technology for commercial purposes but has yet to launch commercial 5G services.

Mint It was reported in October that the telco intended to start offering the service in December.

“The observability solution is also tuned for telecom, and some customers are interested in observability of our telecom solutions,” he added.

The group’s SixthSense unit, which has been providing cybersecurity solutions since 2021, hopes to achieve 15-20% growth with a new set of artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions, focusing on finance, healthcare, retail and government. industry.

Generative AI-based solutions look at multiple signals from multiple systems within a company’s digital infrastructure, connect the dots, correlate them, and predict or prevent these challenges from occurring. If it does occur, it provides end-to-end causation and correlation to quickly resolve the issue.

“We have customers in India and the US. We are now expanding into the wider Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia and the UAE by 2025,” he said, adding that observability or operational labor Intelligence is a $10-15 billion market.