Rakuten Mobile established an international headquarters in Singapore to spearhead the global launch of its fully virtualised, cloud-native mobile communications platform, naming Rabih Dabboussi as head of global sales and marketing.

The site will serve as its central hub for worldwide sales and marketing, and a development centre for the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), the company said.

Dabboussi spent 20 years with Cisco in a range of R&D, technical consulting and leadership roles, before moving on to help establish start-ups covering secure mobile communications, cybersecurity, and digital transformation of governments and enterprises.

The company also plans to establish a unit in the US to lead its sales efforts in the Americas: this will be led by Azita Arvani, GM of Rakuten Mobile, Americas.

In early June, Rakuten Mobile partnered with NEC to develop an open, secure and scalable 4G and 5G cloud-native converged core, which will be a key feature of services offered to global customers through the RCP. At the time, CTO Tareq Amin the architecture is designed as a connectivity platform to enable co-innovation. It plans to test it in brownfield deployments in Japan before exporting.

Commenting on the Singapore move, Amin explained the platform targeted operators, government organisations and enterprise customers, noting it “offers a speedy and cost-efficient deployment of fully virtualised cloud-native network services”.

Amin said: “RCP combines the technology blueprint and expert playbook of our work to date in building the world’s first cloud native mobile network”, adding he looked forward to deploying a system which will “democratise the mobile industry”.