en.Wedoany.com Reported - Rakuten Symphony has announced a senior appointment, naming Amit Bhardwaj, a seasoned technology executive, as President of its Radio Access Network (RAN) business unit. Based in the United States, Bhardwaj will oversee the global RAN operations from the company's Tokyo headquarters, with a core focus on driving the deployment of cloud-native open RAN architectures in collaboration with telecom operators.

Prior to joining Rakuten Symphony, Bhardwaj briefly served as Senior Vice President of RAN and Device Engineering at Boost Mobile, during the company's transition from a facilities-based operator to a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model. Before that, he spent 16 years at Ericsson, where he held the position of Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, overseeing the partnership with T-Mobile US. Bhardwaj succeeds Anil Sawkar, who had led the Rakuten Symphony RAN business unit since its inception in 2021 and will now transition to a role as company advisor.

Sharad Sriwastawa, Representative Director and President of Rakuten Symphony, stated that Bhardwaj's comprehensive experience in network infrastructure will help the company push the boundaries of open RAN and cloud-native technologies. A month earlier, Partha Seetala, Chief AI Officer of the company's cloud division, also departed. Seetala had previously founded Robin IO, which was acquired by Rakuten Symphony in 2022.

This leadership change comes as the RAN market continues to evolve toward more open architectures. Rakuten's telecom business initially entered the market as a mobile operator in Japan, launching services based on an open network architecture and an MVNO model, aiming to disrupt the market dominance of the three major operators: NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI. Following multiple acquisitions and integrations, the Symphony division was established in late 2021, with the goal of promoting open RAN architecture to global networks.

Although Rakuten is regarded by the market as one of the leading cloud-native platform providers for telecom operators, overall market growth has been slow. Dell'Oro Group recently lowered its short-term open RAN revenue expectations. Stefan Pongratz, Vice President of RAN Market Research at the firm, noted that the likelihood of open RAN, cloud RAN, and multi-vendor RAN playing a major role in the latter half of 5G and the early stages of 6G is "possible," "unlikely," and "impossible," respectively.