Rakuten Symphony From Japan Acquires Robin.io

Rakuten Symphony, Inc. announced an agreement to acquire 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 efficient, consistent performance cloud infrastructure and operations, from edge to central data center.
 
Collaboration between the 2 companies has already been underway for more than 2 years, since Rakuten Mobile leveraged Robin.io in production for the Japan deployment of the world’s first end-to-end virtualized cloud-native mobile network. Understanding the high performance requirements of mobile radio and network applications, combined with the need for financial efficiency and automated operation for scale, enabled the 2 firms to create a complete cloud-native offering to deliver and manage the most demanding applications of this and the next era. Now, they 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 differentiated and comprehensive product portfolio, including the following:

• Robin Cloud Native Storage – A 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 – An 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 and 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 reliable, flexible, scalable, secure and resilient mobile networks built on the principles of open interfaces, virtualization and interoperability. The combined companies will also be able to deliver 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.
 
About Rakuten Symphony
It is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on 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. It has HQs in Japan and local presence in the United States, Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East Africa region.