Rakuten Symphony’s Chief Marketing Officer Geoff Hollingworth said Symphony now has an internal group that’s working on innovations to solve future problems. Fierce asked if the group was looking for the “5G killer app,” and Hollingworth said that kind of question was his pet peeve.
Earlier this summer, Hollingworth posted on LinkedIn that “now is the perfect time for telecom to start building more than connectivity solutions.”
Hollingworth told Fierce, “There’s so much activity starting to gain traction outside of telecom. We invest so much in technology but invest so little into the application of that technology. We tend to not look outside at what’s changing. The landscape is completely transforming again because of AI. We need to be designing to solve the future problems.”
To that end, Rakuten Symphony is working on creating business applications.
Rakuten Symphony is the company Rakuten set up to offer a turnkey solution for other operators who want to set up a fully open, disaggregated mobile network. But Mickey Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten Group, always said that the company’s mobile initiative would eventually synergize with the much larger e-commerce business of Rakuten. And now, that’s happening.
Ryan Son, managing director of the internet services business for Rakuten Symphony, said his mandate is to “continue growing the existing services and explore any potential online internet opportunities.”
One of the first new initiatives is Rakuten NEO, a new IoT service that is not strictly tied to telecom.
Rakuten NEO is an IoT platform that can connect IoT devices from many different vendors within the “space management” ecosystem, meaning things like lighting controls, temperature controls and security systems. Rakuten NEO is currently deployed in more than 10 major South Korean enterprises and serving more than 10,000 people per month.
Son said customers benefit because even though they’re using space management technology from many different vendors, they don’t have a plethora of different logins and reports to deal with. They can manage everything from a single Rakuten NEO dashboard.
Asked if there’s any connection with Rakuten Mobile, Son said, “not really.”
In terms of major global trends, he noted that Symphony is looking at its home market in Japan and how it might help businesses digitize and automate more of their functions because there is a sharp decline in population growth, which is creating a labor shortage.
“By 2025, the founders of 1.3 million currently profitable businesses in Japan will reach age of 70 without any successors. These businesses may be forced to closed. Technologies to automate and reduce the need for manpower will trend in Japan,” Son said.
He concluded: “My business unit is how to continuously read global trends.”
Network APIs
Most of the major global telcos are trying to figure out how to use network application programming interfaces (APIs) in a way that developers can create applications on top of their networks.
For instance, Ericsson recently corralled some of the world’s largest telecom operators to create a new venture to combine and sell network APIs on a global scale, with the mission being to spur innovation in digital services.
And Son said, “We don’t limit our thinking to the telco industry alone.” Rakuten Symphony prefers to think of itself as a “tech-co,” and Son and Hollingworth think other global telcos should do the same.
Son even offered a business tip for how telcos could begin offering automation services.
He said that with NEO, Rakuten Symphony didn’t develop the technology from scratch. Instead, it partnered with a South Korean company — Alicorn Space AI — that created the technology. Alicorn does the engineering, development and product work, and Rakuten white labels the product and handles sales and marketing. The partners have a revenue sharing agreement.
“Rather than making just huge investments here and there, it’s smarter to build a business structure by working with small companies that are already doing it,” Son said.
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