“Watch out vendors!” was the cry from Elisabetta Romano, CEO of Telecom Italia’s international division, Sparkle, as she delivered a keynote speech at last week’s Digital Transformation World (DFW) conference in Copenhagen. She was referring to Jio Platforms, the ambitious division of Indian giant Reliance Industries, which houses disruptive MNO Reliance Jio, but also looks set to sell its systems and services to other operators round the world. This mirrors the expansion of Rakuten’s mobile interests from a one-country, if groundbreaking MNO (Rakuten Mobile), to an international supplier of mobile network platforms and services (Rakuten Symphony). Symphony and Jio Platforms are leveraging Open RAN, and the broader expansion of cloud-based and open architectures for RAN, core and orchestration/management. The virtualisation…