Nokia and Red Hat announce cloud strategic partnership

Finnish kit vendor Nokia has announced a strategic partnership with IBM-owned Red Hat that will some Nokia cloud services migrated to Red Hat.

This is one of those more intimate, comprehensive corporate partnerships, with a high degree of mutual commitment. Some Nokia people are even moving to Red Hat to make it happen. The aim is to tightly integrate Nokia’s core network applications with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, in the name of cloud-friendliness.

“This agreement further demonstrates Nokia Cloud and Network Services’ continued momentum to rebalance its portfolio,” said Fran Heeran, GM of Core Networks, Cloud and Network Services at Nokia. “It will allow us to provide customers with our best-in-class core network applications, together with best-in-class cloud infrastructure from Red Hat, a global leader in open source infrastructure technology.”

“Red Hat recognizes the explosive impact of 5G — not only for service providers, but across all industries – with the most exciting developments still to come,” said Darrell Jordan-Smith, SVP, Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment & Edge at Red Hat. “5G is revolutionizing how businesses and people interact with the development of next-generation applications, services and use cases.

“As part of this partnership, Nokia is offering our multicloud, cloud native infrastructure together with their core networks applications, enabling service providers to capitalize on the 5G opportunity by deploying their 5G networks using Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.”

You can see the two of them say more if this sort of thing in the video below.

The customer relationships will still be Nokia’s but it will lean heavily on Red Hat to make the core network magic happen. One specific example of this will be to develop a path for Nokia Container Services and Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software customers to migrate to Red Hat’s platforms over time. Cloud is more of a core competence for Red Hat than Nokia, so the latter is hoping its customers will view this move as offering the best of both worlds.

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