Open-source hybrid cloud software giant Red Hat Inc. is spending much of the first day of its annual Red Hat Summit event talking about the progress it has made with customers — especially in the telecommunications industry, where it’s helping modernize a number of communications service provider’s networks.

Red Hat said today that its open-source hybrid cloud technologies are serving as the foundation telcos need as they look to virtualize and containerize their new 5G networks, with an aim to deliver more innovative applications and faster services to their customers.

Perhaps its biggest success story involves Turkcell İletişim Hizmetleri A.Ş., a leading cell phone services operator in Turkey, which used the Red Hat OpenShift platform as the foundation of its new artificial intelligence services architecture and application hub.

Red Hat OpenShift is an open-source, integrated development environment that’s used to build and deploy container applications managed using the Kubernetes orchestration tool. It’s popular because it makes it simple to manage and automate large numbers of containers that host the components of modern apps.

Turkcell said one of key advantages of OpenShift was that it allowed it to develop and deploy AI applications hosted in both cloud and on-premises that can comply with the complex data regulations it must adhere too. It does this by providing a more consistent, self-service data experience, Turkcell said, and enables nontechnical staff to access its AI Hub to create new services for customers.

The company said it now has more than 50 different services running on OpenShift that support a diverse range of AI-powered applications. The services include digital onboarding for new customers that makes use of computer vision and optical character recognition to validate their profile information and credentials. It has also created its Fizy music streaming service, which applies AI-based emotion detection to user-submitted selfies to suggest songs that match their current mood, and smart voice assistant services that rely on text-to-speech conversion.

İnanç Çakıroğlu, Turkcell’s director of artificial intelligence and analytic solutions, said the company can now bring new AI-based digital services to market with OpenShift in roughly half the time that it could when using its old architecture. “Using Red Hat OpenShift as a flexible, consistent foundation, we have created a ‘playground’ for data science, making the frameworks and tools available to anyone, so we can invite contributions from all over the Turkcell organization,” he said.

Another telco claiming similar success with Red Hat OpenShift is Hong Kong Telecom Ltd., which said that it quickly realized that the outbreak of COVID-19 last year would only accelerate digital transformation. That forced it to move fast, and it used OpenShift to rapidly build and scale its new Club Shopping platform that enables its customers to shop for food and other products online. It also built its DrGop telemedicine platform on OpenShift, a mobile app that helps to connect users Hong Kong registered doctors and other healthcare professionals.

“Through the enhanced reliability and flexibility of Red Hat OpenShift, HKT is able to react more quickly to market shifts and improve our agility while still delivering innovative services to our customers,” said Eric Wong, HKT’s senior vice president of technical service, operations and security.

Belgian telco Proximus Group said it’s just as enthusiastic about OpenShift. It used the open-source platform to quickly replace its legacy network environment with a more flexible one that’s based on network functions virtualization, which is an architectural concept that involves virtualizing entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create communication services. Proximus said it used Red Hat OpenShift along with the Red Hat Ceph Storage platform to run critical service functions in a more cost-effective, scalable way that has helped to reduce its operating costs by up to 20%.

The long list of telcos includes Telecom Argentina S.A. too, which used OpenShift to host its Flow digital entertainment platform that offers a selection of live content and on-demand TV shows, movies, games and music. Telecom Argentina said OpenShift has enabled it to modernize Flow to enable it to scale and quickly add more services to the platform.

“Communication service providers are helping organizations at every enterprise provide groundbreaking innovation while working to modernize their networks in an incredibly competitive market,” said Honoré LaBourdette, Red Hat’s global vice president of telco, media and entertainment. “With Red Hat OpenShift, CSPs can focus on tackling the industries most exciting use cases like edge computing, standalone 5G core and more.”

Image: Red Hat