Rakuten Symphony Collaborates with Wind River, Expanding Partner Ecosystem and Accelerating True Open RAN Choice
Wind River, a global leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, today announced that it is collaborating with Rakuten Symphony to accelerate communication service providers’ (CSPs) adoption of Open RAN technology. The collaboration involves Rakuten Symphony expanding its partner ecosystem for Open RAN 4G and 5G solutions, to support Wind River Studio Operator and Wind River’s recently launched eLxr Pro enterprise Linux offering.
Specifically, the two companies have successfully completed an end-to-end proof of concept, which included Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN 4G and 5G SA vDU and vCU running on Studio Operator. Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN solution provides a software fabric that is field hardened for performance and optimization, covering both LTE and 5G technologies. This enables true pre-proven Open RAN choice on chosen common platforms.
Additionally, the companies will collaborate further to strengthen each other’s platforms. Rakuten Symphony will integrate Wind River’s recently launched eLxr Pro enterprise Linux offering into its cloud portfolio, providing customers with greater flexibility and choice while leveraging the unique edge capabilities and enhanced security of eLxr. Wind River will integrate Rakuten Symphony’s Cloud Native Storage product into Studio Operator, offering advanced storage capabilities designed to support cutting-edge use cases, such as AI.
“By expanding our partner ecosystem to Wind River, we deliver on the promise of providing additional choice to all customers as they accelerate their journey toward Open RAN. Our companies are ready and are looking forward to engaging in customer discussions and bringing our stack to market,” said Raghunath Hariharan, chief technology officer, Rakuten Symphony. “Rakuten Symphony has long been a supporter of open source initiatives, and eLxr Pro creates a great opportunity to provide more choice and flexibility to customers as they develop for the unique challenges of near-edge networks and workloads.”
“Together with Rakuten Symphony, we are delivering a powerful combined stack that increases flexibility and choice, streamlining the transition to cloud-based and Open RAN architectures. This allows CSPs to unlock the full potential of open and cloud RAN, ensuring competitiveness and a fully programmable infrastructure across 4G and 5G while opening new avenues for network monetization,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River. “Moreover, integrating eLxr Pro into the Rakuten Symphony cloud portfolio brings cutting-edge technology that combines open-source flexibility with targeted innovation to meet unique cloud-to-edge deployment needs. Additionally, by incorporating Rakuten Cloud Native Storage into Studio Operator, our customers can run high-performance stateful workloads on our platform for both edge and core use cases.”
Based on the open source StarlingX project, Studio Operator provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It addresses service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing cloud-native infrastructure for core-to-edge distributed cloud networks to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN deployment.
eLxr Pro is based on the open source Debian-based eLxr project, an enterprise-grade distribution powering deployments for intelligent edge, far edge device, near edge server, regional data center, and public cloud scenarios. It provides comprehensive long-term commercial support, professional services, and maintenance beyond the standard lifecycle available with the community-driven eLxr project. Additionally, eLxr Pro delivers stability, security updates, and ongoing technical assistance, as well as services add-ons to address the needs of cloud-to-edge deployments.
Delivering proven technologies that keep telecommunications edge networks running reliably, Wind River has played key roles in the world’s first successful 5G data session; first Open RAN deployment in Canada; in building commercial vRAN/O-RAN programs, including one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world; and in launching the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service.
