Red Hat and Ericsson have announced a broad alliance to deliver fully open source and production-ready cloud infrastructure, spanning OpenStack, software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Ericsson and Red Hat are working together to enable customers to embrace the opportunity presented by the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and other next-generation communications solutions with modern and agile solutions.
The companies have long worked together to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware to Ericsson customers. Today the companies are expanding the collaboration to focus on NFV infrastructure (NFVi), OpenStack, SDN, SDI and containers and help define the next generation of modern technology for the communications industry, including:
- Upstream collaboration: The companies are taking an “upstream first” approach to collaboration across open source projects and communities - including OPNFV, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight - to address customer concerns about lock-in resulting from proprietary forks, differentiating the partnership from other providers.
- Solution certification and new joint offerings: Red Hat and Ericsson are collaborating on hardware and software roadmaps, aimed at developing new joint offerings for NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI. Through the collaboration, the companies plan to work together to certify Ericsson’s platform and portfolio of solutions including Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud SDN solution, and Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and backed by reference architectures and labs.
- Ericsson is expanding its NFV infrastructure solution to also include Red Hat OpenStack Platform to meet the needs of service providers across the globe who require a fully open and agile infrastructure. For their joint NFV infrastructure, SDN and SDI solutions, the companies plan to work together to offer easy-to-deploy solutions, including automated deployment and management.
- Technical alignment to advance container innovation and adoption: Both Red Hat and Ericsson see container technologies as a major part of the platform evolution and will collaborate in upstream activities, in for example the CNCF and OCI communities.
Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat
Red Hat believes that the future of the communications industry will be defined by modern architectures and open source solutions spanning the hybrid cloud, containers, software-defined infrastructure and NFV.
Jason Hoffman, head of Product Area Cloud Infrastructure, Ericsson
The future is open and software defined. Combining Red Hat, the world’s leading open source provider, with Ericsson, the world’s leader in NFV telecom transformation, creates customer speed and choice while enabling customers to confidently embrace open source.
