In this vignette of The 5G Factor, Ron Westfall and Steve Dickens provide their perspective on Red Hat becoming the primary infrastructure platform for Nokia’s Core Network Applications.
The conversation focused on:
Red Hat Becomes the Primary Infrastructure Platform for Nokia’s Core Network Applications. Nokia and Red Hat reached an agreement to integrate Nokia’s core network applications with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and RedHat OpenShift. 350 personnel at Nokia will be transferring to Red Hat as Nokia moves on from developing the platforms that host its software. The duo will jointly support and evolve existing Nokia Container Services (NCS) and Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) customers while developing a path for customers to migrate to Red Hat’s platforms. We delve into the implications for the 5G ecosystem and telco cloud journeys.
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Transcript:
Ron Westfall: One recent development that has I think significant 5G implications is the development between Nokia and Red Hat, where Red Hat will become the primary infrastructure platform for Nokia’s core network applications. And a part of this arrangement includes 350 people at Nokia being transferred over to Red Hat. And from there, Nokia’s software will be developed or will be hosted by Red Hat. So this is a pretty major development.
And one key reason that Nokia is doing this is to aid its telco clients in terms of advancing their cloud journeys. That is avoiding lock-in with a single cloud provider, being able to have choice, really, in how they go about working with different cloud providers and optimizing quite simply, their 5G deployments.
And as we know, Red Hat can be deployed at AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud, as well as in basically any private cloud setting out there. So that part is music to the ears of the telcos, and this also gives at least Nokia’s telco clients an abstraction layer that gives them more flexibility in selecting which cloud providers they work with.
Now, there is one potential trade-off. What if somebody prefers to work with, say, a VMware or a Wind River and so forth? However, I think what we’re seeing is that telcos, at least in the early stages of potentially having more workloads hosted on the cloud, are looking at a full integration approach, something that simplifies their transition and perhaps further out will become more, I guess you could say open about how they select suppliers. But there’s always going to be another telco that is not going in that same direction. I think Dish Network is a good example of an operator who’s really doing a breed approach in terms of integrating all these different solutions. And so stay tuned on how Dish Network progresses with its what can be still called greenfield approach.
But enough of that. Steve, from your perspective, what does Red Hat bring to the table? What do you like about Red Hat and the implications of this arrangement?
Steven Dickens: Well, I mean, I think it was fascinating for me. We see a lot, and you and I cover and our team covers a lot of collaborations. Insert vendor plus other vendors, those two vendors collaborating together on a technology partnership. I think you touched on it, and the interesting piece for me is this was more than that. There were 350 employees from Nokia transferring over to Red Hat. I think that means for me, Nokia’s kind of realizing, “Hey, whilst we did have a container platform, it was never really going to be a market-leader.” It was probably just an acknowledgement from them of, “Hey, yes, we need a containerized solution in our stack. We’ve tried to attempt to sort of get traction with our own.”
A lot of those operators that knock your interfaces with are making independent choices around the Kubernetes and container sort of platform and don’t see that as potentially a vertical component with a Nokia and Ericson, one of those type of providers, and they see it as a more horizontal component to their architecture.
Against that backdrop, if you’re looking at who’s got the best sort of horizontal container layer, there’s two or three vendors in that space. You mentioned VMware, SUSE would be another one. But I think the predominant one in the telco space would be Red Hat and with OpenShift. So I think it makes sense to me for Nokia to start to be pragmatic about where it puts its investment dollars and its people to be able to say, “What are we good at? What are we best partnering with somebody to provide that layer in order to get traction?”
So I think this makes perfect sense to me. I think as I say, the interesting piece in the press release was the transfer of the employees. You don’t normally see that in a technology partnership. So pretty emphatic from Nokia that it’s not only just going to select Red Hat as its preferred sort of vendor of choice in the stack, but also start to exit from the space themselves.
I think you mentioned VMware. It’s going to be interesting to see how that pans out with the Tanzu stack, particularly in the operator space. Obviously VMware’s got a huge presence in the virtual machine space. There’s a lot more competition in the Kubernetes space. You’re not only seeing the likes of Rancher Prime from SUSE, but you are also seeing a lot of the cloud providers, the vendors that you talked about. Google’s got its own Kubernetes deployment. So has Azure. So has AWS.
So I think it’s interesting across this horizontal sort of Red Hat layer as those operators think about not just on-premise but also on the cloud, and keeping that Kubernetes layer consistent across. So I think interesting. As I say, the key takeaway for me was the emphatic-ness of Nokia moving employees over to Red Hat as part of this transition.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, Steve. And I think that was important, bringing out the container aspect here, and the fact that, yeah, it’s a hybrid cloud world, and hybrid cloud basically is joined at the hip with multi-cloud. And I think it can be an opportunity for Red Hat and perhaps a willing cloud partner like Oracle to advance to what could be called the multi-cloud mission, if you will, allowing telcos, but any organization out there, any enterprise out there that just wants more common sense, flexibility, and being able to use multi-cloud. Today it exists but it tends to be siloed off. So people use AWS for one application and then Azure for another application. And yes, you do get the benefits of multi-cloud, but it’s not interconnected. It doesn’t interwork in any convenient and easy to use way.
And so if you’ve seen the European telcos, for example, band to gather to support initiative called Sylva, which is meant to alleviate that issue, and we’ve seen Oracle Cloud for example, to be very specific about, “Hey, we’re here to really make multi-cloud a reality, and get away from egress fees and the silos that the cloud providers, ironically, have created in many instances.”
So yeah, no, I think this is a pragmatic move by Nokia rather than waiting another two, four quarters to say, “Hey, there are other players out there that can be better at the hybrid cloud and container aspects of what we want to accomplish in terms of making 5G a lot more accessible.” Especially with 5G standalone now becoming more mainstream, but also on the horizon, 5G Advanced. And I think that’s where we can see a lot of use cases taking off.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
Steven engages with the world’s largest technology brands to explore new operating models and how they drive innovation and competitive edge.
