Rakuten Symphony agrees to acquire leading US-based cloud technology company Robin.io to deliver highly integrated telco-cloud for mobile

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March 1, 2022 dsprime214 Comments

Focused on reliable high performance, cost efficiency, multi-domain automation

Delivering on today’s mobile operator needs in the simplest way and preparing for the next generation of 5G and Enterprise cloud-native deployments & operations

Partha Seetala to lead Rakuten Symphony’s Unified Cloud business unit

Tokyo, Japan and San Jose, California, March 01– Rakuten Symphony, Inc. today announced an agreement to acquire leading Silicon Valley-based cloud technology start-up, Robin.io. The addition of Robin.io’s multi-cloud mobility, hyper automation and orchestration capabilities to the Rakuten Symphony portfolio allows the creation of highly efficient, consistent high performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data center.

Collaboration between Rakuten and Robin.io has already been underway for more than two years, since Rakuten Mobile leveraged Robin.io in production for the Japan deployment of the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network^*1. Understanding the high performance requirements of mobile radio and network applications, combined with the need for financial efficiency and automated operation for scale, enabled Rakuten Mobile and Robin.io to create a complete cloud-native offering to deliver and manage the most demanding applications of this and the next era. Now, Rakuten Symphony and Robin.io are coming together to further accelerate and strengthen the complete end to end automated cloud offering for customers across the globe.

“Edge cloud requirements are unique and critical as mobile operators transition to 5G: The next era of digital experience requires another level of performance, responsiveness and consistency that enables telecom operator and enterprise transformation to be safely accelerated while creating a platform to support the next 10 years of experiences. Robin.io’s cloud capability is proven to be effective for the most demanding workloads in mobile and we believe it will allow Rakuten Symphony to safely accelerate cloud-native transformation for our customers and prepare the industry for the future,” said Tareq Amin, CEO, Rakuten Symphony. “We plan to continue to invest into Robin.io’s cloud-native portfolio of products to further advance our capabilities and offer the most advanced and highly integrated cloud platform mobile operators demand.”

“I am delighted that Robin.io’s technology innovations over the last several years will now get a much bigger canvas to lead the vision for cloud-native transformation for the industry. Our vision to deliver simple to use, easy to deploy hyperscale automation is very well aligned,” said Partha Seetala, CEO, Robin.io. “We believe Robin.io’s customers will hugely benefit from the synergies of cloud-native technology innovations from Robin.io, and the open competitive infrastructure solutions and global scale of Rakuten Symphony. This is indeed an exciting phase for us as we work together to bring a much larger ecosystem together to deliver higher value for our customers globally.”

With over 70 patents in the cloud-native technology space, Robin.io offers a highly differentiated and comprehensive product portfolio, including the following:

Robin Cloud Native Storage (Robin CNS) – An award winning, high performing, software-defined and industry-first application-aware storage solution that has been built from the ground-up for Kubernetes.
Robin Cloud Native Platform (CNP)– A leading open-source platform optimized for running data and network intensive applications used in production for various use cases involving databases, big data, data analytics, 5G, O-RAN, packet core &edge.
Robin Multi Data Center Automation Platform (MDCAP)– The web-scale platform for metal-to-service orchestration and automation.

Robin.io has petabyte size deployments with its software running on tens of thousands of servers in production today that span across its product portfolio and services Fortune 1000 customers across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Adding Robin.io’s portfolio for cloud-native deployment, lifecycle management and orchestration allows Rakuten Symphony to deploy highly reliable, flexible, scalable, secure and resilient mobile networks built on the principles of open interfaces, virtualization and interoperability. Together, the combined companies will also be able to deliver industry leading solutions for various traditional enterprise opportunities in areas of enterprise applications, data management, cloud and virtualization. Following the acquisition, Partha Seetala will take up the position of President of the Unified Cloud business unit of Rakuten Symphony.

The transaction is subject to closing conditions, including the expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and other customary closing conditions. The terms of the acquisition are confidential.

*1 For a large scale commercial mobile network (as of October 1, 2019). Research: Stella Associate

Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security. Rakuten Symphony has headquarters in Japan and local presence in the United States, Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East Africa region.

For more information, visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com/

Robin.io provides cloud-native capabilities that automate deployment, scaling and lifecycle management of enterprise and 5G applications on Kubernetes. The company’s core technology uses application bundles and application pipelines, which are automated through patented infrastructure and application-topology awareness technology. Robin.io allows developers and platform engineers to deploy and easily manage data rapidly- and network-centric applications—including big data, NoSQL and 5G—independent of underlying infrastructure resources.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Robin.io solutions are recognized by Gartner, IDC, GigaOm and others for their innovation and reliability.

More at www.robin.io and Twitter: @robin4K8S.