---
title: Cisco and Rakuten Symphony plan to accelerate open RAN and telco cloud market - Developing Telecoms
description: Cisco, a leader in technology that powers the internet, and Rakuten Symphony, which offers a modern, industrial-scale automation platform built specifically for telecom, have announced a strategic agreement at MWC Barcelona.
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date: 2022-03-01T13:34:32Z
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Cisco, a leader in technology that powers the internet, and Rakuten Symphony, which offers a modern, industrial-scale automation platform built specifically for telecom, have announced a strategic agreement at MWC Barcelona.

The companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to accelerate the delivery for cloud-native, virtualized 4G/5G mobile networks based on open radio access network (O-RAN) technology.

Building upon the success of parent company Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native network architecture, Rakuten Symphony is working with Cisco to offer solutions that will allow mobile operators to compete more effectively in the cloud era. Together, the companies say, they are addressing the industry need for massive transformation to reduce costs, enhance agility and meet future technical, regulatory and environmental requirements for sustainability.

The companies add that they have crossed many important milestones over the last four years, and they are now applying best practices to develop software-defined solutions that are optimized for the competitive mobile environment, based on automated, agile, high-performance infrastructure.

Notable components of the solutions include Cisco’s mobile, routing, switching, and automation portfolios, along with Rakuten Symphony’s open RAN, orchestration and the full suite of Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld applications.

The two companies plan to work together to validate and certify these solutions for service providers and deliver systems that perform across the full life cycle from design to deployment and operations.

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