Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Orange, one of the world’s leading telco operators and digital service providers, 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.

Cyber Technology Insights: MWC 2025: Intel Unveils Xeon 6 for Network Infrastructure

Orange started its international networks transformation journey eight years ago. Early on, it adopted a network softwarization strategy relying on virtualization of network functions to enable greater flexibility, cost efficiency and sovereignty over its networks and services deployments. More than 30 telco functions from 12 vendors were virtualized, including software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), voice, content delivery network (CDN) and roaming. Building a telco cloud infrastructure was the cornerstone of this approach, with a footprint large enough to be less than 10 milliseconds away from any business-to-business (B2B) or wholesale customer.

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. Benefits of the new platform include:

  • Greater availability and operational efficiency, with improved lifecycle management and easier upgrade process with near-zero downtime;
  • Flexibility, scalability and future-readiness thanks to a common platform that can host both virtualized and containerized workloads in a consistent way on any environment;
  • Faster time to market via fully automated deployment and scaling and zero-touch provisioning. Outcomes include reducing the risk of human error and four times faster deployment times for a service;
  • Improved resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), which enables version control, enhances change management and allows quick redeployment of clusters and network functions in case of failure;
  • Improved security capability, making use of built-in features including network and container isolation and controlled access to applications; and
  • Reduced carbon footprint due to an optimized hardware setup.

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.

Cyber Technology Insights: HPE Boosts Innovation to Help Service Providers at MWC 2025

To participate in our interviews, please write to our CyberTech Media Room at news@intentamplify.com

Source – Businesswire