Open source pioneer Red Hat today stoked its open radio access network (RAN) efforts with more than 250 engineers dedicated to ecosystem expansion.

The IBM subsidiary describes the reinvigorated push as a “bridge for customers to embrace the open RAN movement” with an open, horizontal, cloud-native software platform that’s pre-integrated with multiple hardware and software vendor offerings. 

Red Hat partnered with Altiostar, Ericsson, Intel, Mavenir, Nokia, Samsung, and others to design and assemble a more comprehensive framework. The effort also allows operators to tap into its Kubernetes-based OpenShift platform, which includes containers and microservices for network core, RAN, and edge computing workloads. 

The vendor’s open source foundation paired with reference architecture that forms a platform with other open RAN vendors sets Red Hat’s offering apart from its competitors, Azhar Sayeed, Red Hat’s senior director of global telco technical development, wrote in response to questions. The company also places high emphasis on integration and testing to facilitate innovation across the ecosystem, he added.

“Open source is in Red Hat’s DNA, and each day we work to prove to customers that we provide the value of integration, testing, innovation, and more. With Red Hat, customers are not locked into solutions with no options out,” Sayeed explained.

The company claims about $25 million in cumulative investments to date in open RAN engineering and development with its partners. Red Hat’s reference architecture and expanded group of partners “becomes the bridge between the customer’s needs and the underlying technology,” Sayeed noted. 

Most of Red Hat’s customers “prefer horizontal software architectures that provide the freedom and flexibility to choose workloads from a variety of vendors. This is why we’ve created a reference architecture platform by working with our partner ecosystem to plan, design, implement, and operate service offerings,” he added.

The company is committed to further advancements in open RAN with an eye on innovation in the RAN intelligent controller (RIC), open fronthaul, telemetry, network slicing, metrics, events, and orchestration, according to Sayeed. “Red Hat is actively working to ensure Red Hat OpenShift meets the requirements for RAN workloads, including areas like zero-touch provisioning and zero-touch operations, as both are critical to the success of open RAN.”

Network operators and service providers can deploy Red Hat’s open RAN framework with the aid of a “single systems integrator that pre-integrates and offers single vendor accountability or they may choose multiple vendors and do the systems integration themselves,” Sayeed explained. “This is all possible as long as there is a reference architecture of predefined and validated partners that have been integrated and tested together.”

Other vendors are fostering similar ecosystem plays for open RAN. Proprietary RAN incumbents remain the biggest players in the RAN market, but Red Hat customers are pushing for more open frameworks to automate RAN deployments and management, he said.

Red Hat, which Sayeed describes as “a vendor-neutral platform” that works with many hardware suppliers, intends to continue adding more partners to its open RAN platform.