Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, has announced a partnership with NEC Corporation to deliver 5G solutions built on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. With this partnership, NEC will be able to deliver its next-generation suite of core capabilities to the OpenShift platform.
The NEC 5G core network solutions operating on Red Hat OpenShift will allow organizations to leverage 5G in many applications, including the 5G core, 5G radio access networks (RANs), edge computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more, creating new income opportunities.
This cloud-native network function (CNF) infrastructure will offer service providers a common telecommunications cloud infrastructure for a variety of use cases, helping to reduce management and operational costs. Service providers will also be able to reap the benefits of using an open, horizontal platform that can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30%, according to an ACG Research report backed by Red Hat.
NEC and Red Hat have come a long way together. They recently collaborated to enable operators to deploy Network Function Virtualization (NFV) using NEC solutions and Red Hat’s OpenStack platform. But it turned out that NFV is expensive to build and slow to on-board. So, with the growth of stand-alone 5G deployments, this seems like a good opportunity to focus on enabling operators to implement virtualization on their cloud infrastructure.
Michio Kiuchi, senior vice president, NEC Corporation, commented: “We are pleased to collaborate with Red Hat to help CSPs and DSPs stay competitive in this increasingly demanding global 5G market, especially on the cloud-native front. Through our long-term and continued collaboration with Red Hat, we are working to build an open industry standard which has enormous potential for expanding awareness and adoption of 5G cloud-native network functions.”
Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president, Industries and Global Accounts, Red Hat stated: ” We’re pleased to work with NEC to provide this new infrastructure built on Red Hat OpenShift. NEC understands the power of open principles and through this expanded collaboration, service providers will be able to maximize the benefits of 5G use cases in the telecommunications sector and beyond.”
