Red Hat and Orange have announced a collaboration to provide the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, unifying its containerized and virtual network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

To accelerate its cloud transformation and services softwarization, Orange has chosen to transition its services to a cloud-native infrastructure based on Red Hat platforms. This deployment leverages Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for cloud-native network functions, incorporating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads. Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across its infrastructure. Together, Red Hat and Orange are advancing a vendor-agnostic cloud-native and automation framework for Orange’s international common telco cloud infrastructure, strengthening network services softwarization and industrialization.

The new platform will host a variety of use cases, ranging from SD-WAN and SASE gateway, to IMS, 4G and 5G core, IoT and roaming services. So far Orange has successfully deployed six new points of presence (PoPs) to run live on the platform.

This collaboration with Red Hat enables Orange to be more agile as a business to respond faster to customer needs and market opportunities.

Orange is on track to increase its common telco cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift in the next two years across the globe to 75 telco cloud PoPs, migrating from its existing 50 OpenStack platforms and deploying 25 new PoPs. Helping to meet its sustainability goals, Orange will be able to reuse existing equipment and take advantage of power monitoring capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift to reduce carbon footprint.