YugabyteDB’s Strategic Partnership with Rakuten Mobile Revolutionizes Petabyte-Scale, Cloud-Native, Telecom Infrastructure

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yugabyte, the distributed database experts, today announced key business outcomes with Rakuten Mobile, Japan's newest and most modern mobile network, as a result of their long-standing partnership. Over four years of successful collaboration have resulted in high availability for mission-critical systems, with effortless scalability supporting reduced operational overhead and increased business growth. The two companies partnered to architect and deliver the foundation for Autonomous Network Operations and together are transforming how telecom infrastructure is built and operated.

Rakuten Mobile, a pioneer in Japan’s telecom industry, operates the country’s first fully virtualized mobile network. This next-generation network supports a wide range of essential systems and services, and is built to scale and run with high reliability.

YugabyteDB plays a key role in enabling Rakuten Mobile to efficiently deliver several key modernization initiatives, including Kubernetes cloud-native architecture for OSS and BSS infrastructure, AI-driven operations for autonomous networks with automated fault prediction and corrective actions, and enabling its “Telco-as-a-Service” platform. Joint efforts have enabled Rakuten Mobile to deliver these initiatives at a massive scale without disruption, all while maintaining service continuity.

“At Rakuten Mobile, we’re reimagining telecom by building a network that is fully cloud-native, scalable, and resilient — and YugabyteDB has been a critical enabler of this transformation,” said Sharad Sriwastawa, co-CEO and CTO, Rakuten Mobile. “Our ability to run petabyte-scale, mission-critical applications with zero downtime and full regional redundancy is a testament to the strength of this partnership. Together with Yugabyte, we’re setting a new benchmark for what’s possible in modern telecom infrastructure.”

Delivering Telco Cloud-Native Success

YugabyteDB’s powerful distributed architecture and multi-API flexibility modernize operational applications, including OSS platforms, BSS platforms, internal systems, and international carrier services, for telecom service providers.

With YugabyteDB, Rakuten recently modernized its core infrastructure across regions, with active-active transactional workloads, without service interruption - a testament to the deep technical collaboration between the two companies. This upgrade required petabyte-scale data migrations across regions with zero downtime and no application impact. The project delivered:

• Up to 112% faster write performance and 58% faster reads.
• Faster data migration, enabling large-scale data transfers to complete in under a day.
• Enhanced system resilience, monitoring, and alerting mechanisms to ensure long-term stability.

Commitment to Continuous Innovation

Yugabyte’s platform enhancements, including multi-region Active-Active-Active resiliency, performance improvements, and enterprise observability via YugabyteDB Anywhere (self-managed database-as-a-service), played a crucial role in the success of this project.

“As Rakuten Mobile’s trusted data partner, Yugabyte is helping shape the future of telecommunications services,” said Karthik Ranganathan, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Yugabyte. “The successful upgrade to deliver an enterprise-grade telco cloud for Rakuten Mobile’s infrastructure validates our belief that distributed SQL is foundational for the next generation of telco platforms. This collaboration pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved with cloud-native, multi-region data architecture — and we’re proud to help power their continued innovation.”

This strategic partnership underscores a shared commitment to ongoing innovation and excellence.

To learn more about YugabyteDB, visit our blog, or download the fully open source database to experience the power of distributed SQL.

About Yugabyte

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications. YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance, and cloud-native agility, thus allowing enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. It is trusted by companies in cybersecurity, financial markets, IoT, retail, e-commerce, and other verticals. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and others. Learn more information at www.yugabyte.com.