Red Hat Partners With SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten & More To Boost Its OpenShift Cloud Solutions

Open-source software brings businesses a plethora of benefits, including customization, transparency, interoperability, security, cost-effectiveness, and more.

In fact, open-source means that a particular software application is available to users for free—they’re free to download, edit, and build applications on its framework.

The idea is to allow businesses to customize software applications in a way that streamlines their operations, boosts productivity, and cuts costs while gaining improved security by identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, as well as not getting bogged down by vendor lock-ins or having to break the bank.

This is what open-source solutions leader Red Hat aimed to achieve with its OpenShift platform, which is a cloud-based platform built on Kubernetes that helps users develop, deploy, and manage applications, allowing them to streamline their entire application lifecycle. As such, the platform is one of the most popular ones out there.

In a slew of announcements, Red Hat revealed a range of new partnerships, projects, and plans that are set to further propel its OpenShift offerings.

Red Hat And SoftBank Corp.

Red Hat and SoftBank Corp. announced the two will bring together AI (artificial intelligence) and RAN (Radio Access Networks) to the Red Hat OpenShift platform to optimize power consumption and networking performance.

The implementation of AI-RAN will allow service providers to dynamically adjust network parameters and gain better agility across their network operations.

The move also includes the two working to develop AITRAS—an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift.

SoftBank and Red Hat will also use Red Hat’s Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) to help service providers reduce energy costs across their applications by leveraging power-use metrics. These metrics can then be input into SoftBank’s AITRAS orchestrator to optimize power consumption across disparate sites.

This includes optimizing the placement of compute- and GPU-intensive workloads, enabling lightweight measuring to help reduce overhead and improve energy efficiency, and achieving more precise GPU energy calculations.

Red Hat And Rakuten

Red Hat announced that it will provide Rakuten Mobile with access to its expertise, technology, and experience in managing complex and expansive Linux estates, all while allowing its own experts to innovate and enhance customer experience. This consists of using Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux for its fully virtualized end-to-end cloud-native network.

The same solutions will be provided to Rakuten Symphony, a global provider of cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services, allowing them to empower its global telco and enterprise customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s advanced security features, vendor neutrality, and hybrid cloud consistency—along with other features—will boost Rakuten’s open RAN initiatives, licensing, private 5G partnerships, and satellite-enabled LTE connectivity.

Red Hat will also support Rakuten Cloud’s efforts to certify its Cloud-Native Storage on Red Hat OpenShift facilitating easier integration with Kubernetes-native tooling.

Red Hat And Fujitsu

Building on its Rakuten move, Red Hat also announced a global collaboration with Fujitsu to deliver a cloud-native, AI-ready virtualized radio access network (vRAN) solution on its OpenShift platform.

The idea is to help service providers improve efficiency and network optimization while expanding operations to diverse applications with greater consistency and flexibility. OpenShift will shape Fujitsu’s O-RAN O-Cloud based solution, which is a cloud-native platform to support virtualized and containerized open RAN functions.

The move will bring Fujitsu’s customers advanced orchestration and automation, ultra-low latency and improved performance, and an AI-ready vRAN, bringing service providers a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Red Hat and KDDI

Red Hat will work with Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI to develop and deploy an open radio access network (Open RAN) built on Red Hat OpenShift to streamline Day 0 and Day 2 operations.

The plan is to minimize downtime and accelerate software installation and upgrade processes by leveraging image-based install (IBI) and image-based upgrade (IBU) to accelerate software installation and upgrade processes.

A part of this deal includes Red Hat collaborating with KDDI and Samsung to deliver increased flexibility and stability in the network by using Samsung's software-based network solutions, including its vRAN.

Red Hat And Orange

Red Hat also revealed a collaboration with Orange, one of the world’s leading telco operators and digital service providers, which will Red Hat provide the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, unifying its containerized and virtual network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The deal will see Orange accelerate its cloud transformation and services softwarization by using Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for cloud-native network functions, as well as Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads.

This will see Red Hat make Orange more agile, allowing it to achieve greater availability and operational efficiency, improved lifecycle management, an easier upgrade process with near-zero downtime, enhanced flexibility, scalability and future-readiness, faster time to market improved resilience and security capability, all while reducing its carbon footprint.

Red Hat And Safaricom

Red Hat further spoke about a partnership with Safaricom to support its cloud transformation by deploying Red Hat OpenShift as its common cloud platform, including powering the M-PESA mobile payment system.

The idea is to improve mobile experiences and financial inclusion for millions of Safaricom’s customers.

The collaboration will allow Safaricom to modernize its IT infrastructure, and achieve up to 99.98% availability, 2x faster turnaround time, enhanced customer experience and automation capabilities, and enhanced stability, security, and improved customer experiences.

The deal involves Safaricom transitioning to a containerized, cloud-native architecture using Red Hat’s Advanced Cluster Security and Advanced Cluster Management for enhanced security and workload orchestration—a move that might see Safaricom expand this transformation into its 5G core network through a proof-of-concept initiative.

Red Hat And StarHub

Red Hat will help leading Singaporean telecommunications service provider StarHub with its hybrid cloud transformation plan. As such, StarHub has already implemented a hybrid multi-cloud solution—Cloud Infinity—which is built on Red Hat OpenShift.

The move will enable StarHub to enjoy better optimizing costs, address compliance requirements, and maintain operational control while more seamlessly delivering new services.

Benefits from this move include continuous integration, delivery, and testing (CI/CD/CT), improved security, and enhanced cloud usage flexibility and control, among others.

These moves follow Red Hat’s recent acquisition of Neural Magic, which will enable it to bring optimized generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) innovation—including expertise in inference performance engineering and model optimization—across the hybrid cloud, as well as other recent moves.

Do you think these moves have provided Red Hat with an advantage over its competitors?

Let us know in the comments below!