Red Hat gives thanks for Turkcell virtualization win

Turkish operator Turkcell has launched a virtualization platform called Unified Telco Cloud that’s based on Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform.

As the name implies this new platform is all about centralising all its services onto a single virtualized infrastructure. This NFVi then allows east selection and implementation of virtual network functions, or so the story goes. Examples of operators going all-in on this stuff are still sufficiently rare for this to be noteworthy.

As a consequence this deal win is also a big deal for Red Hat, which has invested heavily in attacking the telco virtualization market from an open source direction, as is its wont. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is its carrier-grade distribution of the open source hybrid cloud platform. Turkcell is also using Red Hat Ceph Storage, a software-defined storage technology designed for this sort of thing.

“Our goal is to remake Turkcell as a digital services provider, and our business ambitions are global,” said Gediz Sezgin, CTO of Turkcell. “While planning for upcoming 5G and edge computing evolution in our network, we need to increase vendor independence and horizontal scalability to help maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of our CAPEX investment.

“With the Unified Telco Cloud, we want to lower the barrier to entry of our own network to make it a breeding ground for innovation and competition. In parallel, we want to unify infrastructure and decrease operational costs. Red Hat seemed a natural choice of partner given its leadership in the OpenStack community, its interoperability and collaboration with the vendor ecosystem and its business transformation work with other operators.”

Another key partner for Turkcell in this was Affirmed Networks, which specialises in virtualized mobile networks. “We initially selected Affirmed Networks based on their innovation in the area of network transformation and virtualization and their work with some of the world’s largest operators,” said Sezgin.

It’s good to see some of the endlessly hyped promise of NFV actually being put into effect and it will be interesting to see what kind of ROI Turkcell claims to have got from its Unified Telco Cloud. With organisations such as the O-RAN Alliance apparently gathering momentum, open source could be a major theme of this year’s MWC too.