Rakuten, though famous for achieving the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native cellular network, has been very open about how difficult this was. The vision of being able to assemble multivendor VNFs on commodity servers with the same ease as configuring the apps on a new PC is very far from a reality, as Rakuten’s chief architecture officer, Tareq Amin, has made clear. He put some more detail behind his view, and laid down the gauntlet to large and small vendors, in a fascinating interview with SDxCentral. In it, he highlighted the need for suppliers to get far more experience of actual deployment of multivendor, cloud-based networks, so that operators will not need to invest such large amounts of cost and resource…