In a big win for Mirantis, Vodafone has selected the company to provide managed open cloud services for its IT and network functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives.

Mirantis today said it will provide OpenStack-based virtualization infrastructure management (VIM) to Vodafone’s “Project Ocean.” This is the service provider’s  program to virtualize its network and compute infrastructure and to use cloud technology.

As a part of Project Ocean, Mirantis will supply VIM services based on the Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP), launched last month.

“It will be running across all of the sites,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO. “We see this as validation of our model of managed open cloud being the right way to deliver services to the customers as opposed to selling software subscriptions or licenses, which is the other model.”

Under this new “operations-centric approach,” Mirantis will update the software weekly, which the company says means no down time for the customer.

“An open and multi-vendor cloud infrastructure is key for delivering better, faster and smarter services to our customers,” said David Amzallag, head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV, Vodafone Group, in a statement.

In addition to the Vodafone-Ocean win, Mirantis also said it has signed a global procurement agreement to deliver managed open cloud for Vodafone Cloudstore, which is Vodafone's cloud marketplace. The first implementation is already underway.

In addition to validating Mirantis’ model of managed open cloud, the Vodafone deal is also a signal of what’s next for the telecommunications industry: namely 5G.

“The 5G network is disaggregated and virtualized,”Renski said. “The general consensus among all telcos is that as they move to 5G, this is going to be a prerequisite.

“What telcos are going through is very similar to what enterprises went through 15 years ago, moving from aggregate, mainframe site, procurement models for IT, to disaggregation between hardware and software. Also through this disaggregation telcos are able to realize significant cost savings. This is important for 5G because 5G requires a lot of infrastructure investment.”

Renski said the company has been working with other telcos including AT&T and Comcast on similar NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) projects.

“AT&T Cloud Services is using Mirantis OpenStack as the software substrate for their VIM for both the IT side workloads and NFV side workloads, operating at a scale of over 6,000 nodes that Mirantis OpenStack covers,” Renski said.