Posted by Singapore: Rakuten Symphony and F5 have joined hands to bring F5’s new BIG-IP Next Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) to global customers. Through its Symworld marketplace, Rakuten Symphony will make availability of F5 CNFs to global customers. With this, Rakuten Symphony and F5 have further expanded their longstanding relationship.
F5 CNFs offer a rich set of capabilities, dynamic elasticity and scale while supporting continuous deployment and automation, with a small footprint.
Generally available later this year, the functions will include BIG-IP Next Edge Firewall CNF, BIG-IP Next Policy Enforcer CNF, BIG-IP Next DNS CNF, BIG-IP Next CGNAT CNF. They will support a variety of use cases that can be deployed in a simple and automated manner to secure and enhance 5G deployments.
With the availability of F5 CNFs in the Symworld marketplace, Rakuten Symphony and F5 are working to speed up and simplify this process for telecom operators. The cloud-native functions helps to reduce application deployment from months and years to minutes and hours enabling faster delivery. This gives F5 quicker access to market and offers telecom operators a vastly improved network update cadence, critical for ensuring security.
Rakuten Mobile’s 5G network in Japan will also deploy F5’s BIG-IP Next CNFs. This deployment is the result of three years of collaboration between Rakuten and F5 that included the roll-out of the first end-to-end fully virtualized 4G network in the world. Together F5 and Rakuten leveraged that experience to simplify operations and strengthen security and traffic optimization for Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native 5G deployment.
Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony said that F5 has been a key partner in Rakuten’s journey to becoming a mobile operator.
“We have actively collaborated on what needs to change in the industry for many years and I am more than excited to be able to announce that F5’s newly developed products will be deployed by Rakuten Mobile and offered through Symworld,” added Amin.
“We are delighted to be working with Rakuten – one of the world’s most cloud-savvy and forward-thinking service providers – to integrate our new cloud-native software into both the Rakuten Mobile network in Japan and the Symworld marketplace,” said Ahmed Guetari, F5 VP of Products for Service Providers.
“Together with Rakuten Symphony, we are looking forward to enabling service providers across the world to easily deploy F5’s expanding suite of cloud-native network functions to enrich and protect their 5G networks and offerings,” added Guetari.