Red Hat lands a deal with India's Vodafone Idea to build network platform

India's Vodafone Idea Limited has picked open source vendor Red Hat to build out its distributed network data centers across a "universal cloud."

The "network-as-a-platform" that Red Hat is building will also be extended to third-party workloads. With the largest distributed cloud deployment in India, Vodafone Idea (VIL) is transforming its more than 100 data centers by using a universal cloud where a shared software platform is capable of running multiple workloads at the same time.

Services and applications, such as IT and third-party applications, can be accessed across Vodafone Idea's distributed cloud locations. Vodafone Idea is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to migrate its network data centers to the open interfaces-based universal cloud.

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Red Hat is also designing network pods for Vodafone Idea, which can be distributed geographically across its footprint and closer to the end users in order to reduce latency. Using Red Hat's open APIs, Vodafone Idea will be able to deliver actionable insights to its enterprise customers.  

Red Hat will also work with Vodafone Idea to establish a DevOps team to co-create new services and products and extend the platform to start-ups and developers. As the name suggests, Vodafone Idea will roll out Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate its workflows and extend self-provisioning capabilities to its end customers.

Red Hat's Global Services team will work with Vodafone Idea to implement the various strategies and technologies.

“We’re pleased to have helped VIL setup the distributed cloud platform and further support it extending it to a broad range of customers, including small to medium-sized enterprises and start-ups," said Marshal Correia, vice president and general manager, Red Hat India, in a statement. "By adopting a more agile, DevOps-cantered workflow based on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, VIL customers can more quickly adapt to changing market conditions. We look forward to continuing our work with VIL as they look to build out additional offerings on this flexible platform.”

Along with Reliance Jio and Airtel, Vodafone is one of India's leading telecom service providers. According to the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India report, Vodafone Idea lost 4.95 million mobile phone subscribers in August while Reliance Jio added 8.44 million.

Reliance Jio’s overall subscriber base is 348.2 million, while Vodafone Idea has 375 million and Airtel 327.9 million.