Dell and Rakuten Cloud join forces for telecom and edge cloud innovation

I had the pleasure to speak with Eric Van Vliet, Dell Technologies’ Director for Telecom Market Development, EMEA, about the partnership between Dell and Rakuten Cloud, the cloud business unit of Rakuten Symphony.

Great synergy and focus exist between the two organizations: Dell provides high-performance infrastructure and Rakuten Cloud brings cloud and telecom software innovations.

For Rakuten Cloud, this partnership is important because high-performance infrastructure is a big part of how we deliver our software solutions to operators especially with Open RAN where there are dependencies on acceleration, hardware set up and so on.

Having launched its telecom infrastructure business in 2020, Dell Technologies has seen success in the market due to its emphasis on bringing innovation to operators. The relationship with Rakuten Cloud brings innovative cloud solutions that emphasize automation and AI for dramatic improvements in efficiency and management, and reduction in costs.

“Historically, if we’re looking at the telecom industry, due to its critical nature to every country and every society, it’s always difficult to innovate because with new innovation comes risk. But when society has evolved, and we saw this with 4G and 5G, there’s more and more demand.  Now, if we’re looking at coming together as an ecosystem, it’s all about moving things forward, accelerating progress and helping the telecom service providers to take that next step.”

- Eric Van Vliet, Dell Technologies’ Director for Telecom Market Development, EMEA

Rakuten Cloud is part of Dell’s Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL) which offers a place where Dell and ecosystem members can validate and certify their applications on Dell hardware. The OTEL is an important link in validating virtualized / containerized applications as well as Open RAN solutions that need integration.

Not limited to telecom

The innovation isn’t limited to telecom applications as we’ve also helped enterprises with processing analytics data at the edge. It’s a good example of collaboration as Dell was exploring edge computing and Rakuten Cloud was investigating analytics solutions. When both companies brought their work together a brand-new solution emerged.

Dell has integrated our Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform, Cloud-Native Orchestrator and Cloud-Native Storage into the Dell Validated Design for Analytics – Data Lakehouse. This design creates edge servers that can ingest large amounts of data and accommodate large data models. I co-authored a white paper on this solution with Dell and Intel.    

Eric reminded us that operators and companies in other industries are facing a new environment with more competition, higher demand and a need to move faster to keep up with the expectations of customers. By working together, Dell and Rakuten Cloud can deliver the innovation that operators and enterprises need to navigate this new reality.