Tokyo – Building on the existing multi-year relationship, Nokia, Rakuten Mobile, Inc., and Rakuten Symphony, Inc., today announced plans to further accelerate industry change with the inclusion of all Nokia cloud-native Core software on Rakuten Symphony’s SymworldTM marketplace. The development will support Rakuten Symphony to be the first to enable browsing, selecting, and installing of software into live network operations via a “one-click” operation for communication service providers (CSPs).

The SymworldTM marketplace was created to simplify the process of telecom application onboarding and making approved applications generally available for all SymworldTM customers. The SymworldTM platform digitalizes all telecom processes for planning, deploying, securing, and monitoring the software in live telecom networks; and makes SymworldTM marketplace applications one click away from deployment.

All telecom software is becoming cloud-native and possible to procure through a marketplace experience. Nokia is well-placed to deliver on that experience, having already rearchitected its software applications in recent years to make them fully cloud-native and deployable in any cloud environment, edge, public or private.

The SymworldTM marketplace by Rakuten Symphony is the first telecom marketplace in the world designed to serve the needs of CSPs and is creating a marketplace of Rakuten and third-party applications in order to provide for the rapid procurement and delivery of telco services as 5G rollouts advance.

Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony, Inc., said: "We have a long and successful relationship with Nokia in Rakuten Mobile and together in Japan we have radically accelerated change in the telecom industry. We want to do more and we are extremely happy to partner with Nokia now to drive the marketplace way of working in the live network with Nokia’s world class cloud-native core products. The SymworldTM marketplace approach to deployment changes system integration from being months away, to being days or hours away.”

Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, said: “As a telecom cloud-native software leader and a mobile core technology leader, Nokia’s Cloud and Network Solutions will provide all our cloud-native Core software and work with Rakuten Symphony to enrich the SymworldTM marketplace for all mobile operators. We look forward to this new chapter with Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony and supporting their disruptive ambitions in the telco space.”