ABI Research deemed Wind River, Red Hat, and Rakuten Symphony as the market’s top providers of telecom-focused cloud-native platforms, with the research firm noting such offerings are becoming increasingly important for telecom operators as they re-architect their networks.

The recent report touted those three providers as having “emerged as clear leaders in delivering container-as-a-service (CaaS) solutions optimized for 5G core and radio access network (RAN) workloads. These platforms are setting the pace for innovation and implementation as the telecom industry shifts toward more distributed, automated, and secure cloud-native architectures.”

Wind River topped the ranking, with the research firm specifically pointing to its “extensive deployments across [tier-one] operators and its ability to deliver deterministic performance for RAN and edge environments.”

This was recently highlighted by global telecom provider Vodafone tapping Wind River to support its open RAN efforts in Europe. That specific work will see Vodafone layer Wind River’s CaaS platform on top of open RAN equipment from Samsung.

Wind River’s market strength was also evident when Boost Mobile went through the effort of using the vendor to replace the carrier’s long-standing use of VMware’s CaaS platform.

ABI Research positioned Red Hat and its OpenShift platform “closely” behind Wind River, with the research firm noting OpenShift “has become a de facto standard for telco-grade Kubernetes by offering advanced CI/CD integration and multi-cluster policy governance.”

That presence was evident in Red Hat’s recent deal with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Ericsson to create a validation lab in Sweden focused on fostering integrated multivendor telecommunication platforms targeted at operators looking for scalable core infrastructure to power their 5G network deployments.

Rakuten Symphony also garnered accolades for its ability to leverage operations experience from its sister-company Rakuten Mobile to “deliver automation-first solutions that significantly reduce deployment timelines and operational complexity.” That ability is being tested as part of AT&T’s extensive open RAN deployment.

These abilities are becoming increasingly important for operators as they overhaul their network architectures.

ABI Research Senior Research Director Dimitris Mavrakis noted that operators need platforms that “combine Kubernetes automation with telco-grade security, observability, and lifecycle management.”

The analyst firm also linked this shift to operators preparing their networks to better support what it termed the “next phase of the AI supercycle,” which it claims will be the distribution of AI inferencing across the network.

Verizon Business recently touted this link as part of a recent fixed-wireless access (FWA) technology update. That move has the carrier offering its enterprise-focused FWA service using 5G network slicing technology, which will allow for more consistence service performance and support service-level agreements (SLAs).

Scott Lawrence, chief product officer at Verizon Business, positioned the new offering as a way to better support uplink-heavy traffic like uploading content into a cloud environment or AI systems.

“As businesses take on AI-centric workloads (e.g. inferencing at the edge), they are now uploading more data than ever before,” Lawrence explained. “They’re capturing huge amounts of data from their operating environments (central or remote), uploading it into their systems, and transferring it into cloud instances and software platforms for AI-driven insights and generative actions.”