Nokia is offloading primary support and ongoing development of its container and cloud infrastructure operations to Red Hat in a move that will bolster the latter’s OpenShift and OpenStack platforms to support 5G, core, open radio access network (RAN) and multi-access edge computing (MEC) services.

The deal has Nokia adopting Red Hat as its “primary cloud infrastructure platform” for the development, testing and delivery of Nokia’s core network applications. This includes Red Hat absorbing Nokia Container Services (NCS) and Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) into its container-focused OpenShift and virtual machine (VM)-focused OpenStack platforms.

The two companies will provide a transition path for customers to move from the Nokia-managed version of those services to the Red Hat platform.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, SVP for telecommunications, media and entertainment and edge at Red Hat, explained during a press briefing on the news that, “we're going to be doing that very tightly with both Nokia’s clients, which will be actually Red Hat's clients over time, as well as working very closely with Nokia to make sure that we are a primary platform for their business as they move forward.”

Nokia, in the meantime, will continue to ship and deliver the NCS and CBIS platforms to its customers and will also remain the main point of contact for customers. And Red Hat will continue to provide its OpenShift and recently bolstered OpenStack platforms to the industry.

Red Hat will also be taking on more than 350 Nokia employees from that vendor’s cloud infrastructure teams.

Fran Heeran, SVP and GM of core networks, cloud and network services for Nokia, said this transition will include employees from Nokia’s research and development and product development department; from its services and delivery teams responsible for delivering the platform to customers; “and then the care and support team, which would be the level-three, level-four as we call them internally here at Nokia, which is the detailed care support organizations will also move over as part of that.”

“For us, that's particularly important because the customer care associates really expand our capabilities in terms of what we here at Red Hat call customer success, and driving adoption and deployment of these core technologies in a consistent and scalable manner is going to be particularly important in telecommunications because scale actually does matter and predictability, availability are very important topics,” Jordan-Smith added. “So these resources will be mainly aligned to R&D and to our services organization within our company.”

Heeran said the vendor is making the move as it adjusts to market demands. This includes operators increasingly moving from what had been vertically integrated telecom stacks to a more horizontal approach.

“We're seeing a change in that market now where customers increasingly want to build a horizontal solution to a standard architecture, standard cloud infrastructure for all applications coming from all suppliers into their network,” Heeran said. “That's not a market that Nokia was pursuing. We were very clear for a long time that we were very focused on the cloud infrastructure supporting our own applications with some third-party elements as well. So with the market evolving that way it was very important that we had a technology offering as part of our full-stack solution in core networks that allowed customers to take that horizontal approach.”

The move also allow for some simplification in the market, which Heeran said would drive further adoption.

“I would like to see, or we would like to see, the landscape getting a little bit simpler and having a little bit less choice, but right now I think it’s going in the opposite direction,” Heeran added. “Eventually, something will have to settle down and mature and that's kind of also what played into our thinking in this relationship with Red Hat was a drive toward that simplicity of being able to focus on a smaller number of platforms, but also be able to deliver exactly what our customers want.”

Jordan-Smith noted the deal will provide Red Hat with greater access and insight into emerging operating and business support (OSS/BSS) services in 5G environments.

“We're seeing convergence in the marketplace in terms of a lot of our customers wanting to leverage the telco cloud into their OSS, BSS and IT-based environments,” Jordan-Smith said. “In addition to that, migrating those environments to the edge and into the multi-edge compute, MEC environments as well as also into the enterprise space with 5G private, slicing and other sorts of technologies, we think that having a common platform enables our customers to move fast and move confidently into where they need to go and how they need to scale and we think that this is a great opportunity and a non-exclusive opportunity for us to do that.”

Despite the tight partnership, Heeran did note that Nokia customers would still have choice in terms of an underlying platform. He said that the most likely scenario will be for an operator to want a full-platform stack with no preference for underlying providers, which in that case will be provided by the new partnership with Red Hat.

The other path will be from operators that do have a specific underlying architecture, most likely from an established hyperscaler, in which case Nokia will “be fully supporting deploying our applications on those platforms as well.”

“So it's kind of a best of both worlds, with the full-stack solution coming with Nokia plus Red Hat, and then there's also a choice to deploy Nokia applications on what we would call [container-as-a-service] or third-party CaaS platforms as well,” Heeran said.

Nokia will also continue to support all existing 5G core integrations with Red Hat rivals like VMware, and similarily Red Hat will continue to support overlaid 5G core systems from other vendors like Ericsson and Samsung. However, its focus will be on Red Hat.

“We're very excited to work with them looking forward and we think it's going to be an incredible evolution for our portfolio but also for both companies together,” Heeran added.