MWC25: Why Red Hat is Prioritising Telco Partnerships
Red Hat has announced several partnerships with telecommunications industry leaders at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2025, as the company strengthens its position in the telco cloud transformation market.
The company revealed collaborations with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI and Orange, providing technology solutions to support network virtualisation and cloud-native evolution.
Hanen Garcia, Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat, who has been with the company for nearly a decade, spoke exclusively with Mobile Magazine about the expansion of Red Hat's partner ecosystem.
“Since we started working with telcos, we have understood how important it is to partner within the ecosystem,” he says. “Within the last year, we have been increasing the size of our ecosystem by bringing critical partners in.”
Powering a cloud-native network
One of the partnerships announced by Red Hat was an expanded collaboration with Fujitsu to deliver a virtualised radio access network (vRAN) solution on Red Hat OpenShift, the company's hybrid cloud application platform.
Hanen shares: “The work that we are doing on vRAN sees us also collaborating with other partners like Ericsson and Nokia to transform telco networks.
“There is a constant evolution within these ecosystems and we are looking at bringing even more partners on so we are ready together to help customers on whatever challenges they have on the current technology or the next evolution of the technology.”
- SoftBank: AI-driven power optimisation solutions
- Fujitsu: Delivering vRAN solutions on Red Hat OpenShift
- Rakuten Mobile: Enhancing Open RAN solutions and cloud-native infrastructure
- KDDI: Minimising downtime and accelerating software deployment with Open RAN
- Orange: Accelerating telco cloud transformation
Red Hat's innovation strategy centres on building a comprehensive partner ecosystem to address customer requirements across current and future network technologies. These partnerships span the telecommunications infrastructure stack, from hardware components to network functions.
The company also continues to support the telecommunications industry's transition from network function virtualisation (NFV) to cloud-native platforms.
“I can talk for a long time about that,” Hanen says. “Since the evolution of network virtualisation, we have been working with customers and the ecosystem and have found there is a devolution that’s happening now, from virtualisation to the cloud-native platform.
“There have been some announcements from us around that with KDDI and also T-Mobile, who has selected the Red Hat platform for the evolution of the network itself.
"So we are constantly looking into that evolution, serving the customers, bringing the right size and the right mix between our capabilities - not only on the cloud platform that we deliver, but also working with our hardware partners as well.”
Integrating AI into telco networks
The platform development extends beyond software to include hardware partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers including Intel, Arm and Nvidia. These collaborations ensure partners can utilise the capabilities within Red Hat's platform.
Introducing AI capabilities represents the next phase in telecommunications network transformation for Red Hat.
“Since we started working with telcos, we have understood how important it is to partner within the ecosystem.”
Hanen explains: “We are looking at introducing AI into some capabilities in the network, but also at how the technology would serve other customers with those capabilities.
“We are bringing that into the same platform so that the customer has consistency when managing the network
The company has already started to implement AI technology within radio access networks through its collaborations with Fujitsu and SoftBank.
“Introducing AI into the radio access network is crucial and will accelerate the transformation that has been happening on the networks so far,” Hanen says.
As a leading platform for cloud transformation, Red Hat maintains focus on future network evolutions, including 5G Advanced. The company works with open source communities to develop new applications for AI within its platform.
“We are right now moving from 4G to 5G. While there are plenty of 5G deployments, the next wave 5G Advanced is not far away,” Hanen shares. “So we are looking at the next evolution of our platform and what capabilities we need to support these continued evolutions across the network.
“With the open source community, we bring together all of the innovation across those communities into the platform so that the customer can benefit as soon as possible from those technology advancements.”
“Introducing AI into the radio access network is crucial.”
At MWC Barcelona 2025, Red Hat showcased some of these developments via demonstrations focused on platform lifecycle management and network operations enhancement.
When asked about what he is most excited to showcase, Hanen says: “We are now moving towards how we can actually manage the lifecycle of the platform itself, especially for our customers, and how we are bringing our partner ecosystem into the management of that lifecycle.
“We are also sharing how our customers can use AI to actually improve their networks.”
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