Rakuten sees ‘huge potential’ for OSS—‘This is the home of innovation’

In a cloud-native world, the OSS should serve as an app store filled with tools for automation, orchestration, workflow engines and more Rakuten Group, with its operator Rakuten Mobile and hardware/software/services vendor subsidiary Rakuten Symphony, don’t live in the legacy world. The greenfield network is new, built using cloud-native and Open RAN principles; the processes and workflows are new—it’s all about automating what can be automated while creating net new value; and it’s about new thinking. As this relates to operational support systems (OSS), Managing Director and President of OSS Rahul Atri expressed this new way of thinking during a session at the Telco Cloud and Edge Forum, available on demand here. Before looking at the present and future, he looked at the past. “When we designed the OSS system, it was for management of the network functions and figuring out if the network is performing good, bad, and connecting the dots. It has evolved into a service assurance [tool] where you could actually see services and know what the behavior of the services are. Now, when we see how we are evolving in terms of ecosystem technology, things have been super fast.” This “super fast” evolution includes an embrace of IT and cloud-native computing best set practices, things like GitOps, AIOps, and other areas that are all new to the world of telecoms. And all in pursuit of the expectation that networks will become “agile, infinite and always available for any kind of use case to be supported.” In the march to network slicing, scaling in and scaling out, disaggregating hardware and software, pushing the user plane function to the edge and more, “I think OSS is a perfect place to have those synergies and figure out how we can convert multiple brains into applets. One of the functions could be automation, could be orchestration, could be workflow engines, and also about the digital maps which you need across the lifecycle management. I see OSS as a huge potential. I’m still trying to figure out what should be the right name for it. But, for me, this is the home of innovation, and if we want to do cultural revolution…think about future use cases, OSS has to be the platform.” In this revolution, Atri recommended a departure from buzzwords and a real, clear-eyed definition of “what is success…It’s also important to understand what problem we’re solving, what solutions are best…That can be OSS, that can be your automation platform, that can be [an] AI platform in the future. But the North Star vision of where we want to end up is the key, and that’s how the organization itself gets aligned.” Atri is a regular on the conference circuit and he’s generous with his time when it comes to talking to the trade press. One thing that comes up in conversations with him is a sort of dual focus on cutting-edge technology but also tried-and-true management theory. As the move to cloud-native networking highlighted, a lot of the problems to be solved have more to do with people than with the technology those people have at their disposal. As he put it, “Technology is not a problem…It’s about how your organizations are structured.” One issue Atri addressed was striking the right balance between designing and deploying standards-compliant solutions in an era when cloud-native is broadening the pool of “telco” tech and moving faster than any standards body could match. For operators, he acknowledged the need for standardization but also noted that parallel developments in open source communities, not to mention firms like Rakuten taking a do-it-yourself approach, is where “the innovation comes in. Standard could be an end-state, doesn’t have to be a starting point, doesn’t ‘have to be a checkpoint…We should always look for innovation and the success criteria and obviously evolve together.” Regardless of whether an operator builds or buys an OSS, Atri circled back to his point around defining outcomes and success. “If it is agility, if it is automation, if it is efficiency, it is ROI. Let’s define that.”