Since placing the Rakuten Cloud Platform (RCP) into a separate company, Symphony, the Japanese firm is under pressure to flesh out the offering, and provide a wider choice of vendors and functions that those its mobile operator arm has deployed in Japan. The company is adding elements to RCP via development, acquisition and partnership, in a bid to assemble a full portfolio of pre-integrated elements before other efforts to create an Open RAN platform can make an impact. The aim of RCP is to allow operators to mix and match hardware and software components from different vendors, without the time and cost to integrate them all inhouse, or rely on an expensive systems integrator. Provided the chosen products are RCP-compliant,…