Red Hat Extends Cloud-Native Reach Across Multiple Telecom Providers

March 3, 2026 Mike Vizard AI factory, cloud-native software, CNCF survey, cost reduction, digital transformation, distributed applications, edge computing, IT infrastructure, kubernetes, KubeVirt, legacy applications, Mobile World Congress, Openshift, openstack, telecommunications services, Telenor, virtualization, Vodafone

by Mike Vizard

Red Hat, this week at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2026 conference, revealed that a number of providers of telecommunications services have opted to adopt its platforms to build and deploy cloud native software for both internal operations and external-facing applications.

Telefónica Spain, for example, is standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift as the common platform for its IT workloads and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). It is also integrating Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift to modernize its existing virtual machine infrastructure

At the same time, Telefónica Brazil has migrated its service bus IT environment from legacy virtualization to Red Hat OpenShift, while Telenor, a telecommunications service provider in Finland, has selected Red Hat platforms to build an artificial intelligence (AI) factory based on frameworks from NVIDIA.

Finally, Vodafone Oman is further advancing its digital transformation by standardizing its IT infrastructure on Red Hat’s cloud-native platform, while Bell Canada revealed it has extended its collaboration with Red Hat to build platforms based on Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Fran Heeran, vice president and head of the Global Telecommunications Business Unit at Red Hat, said each of these alliances are examples of how organizations are finding ways to bridge monolithic applications deployed on virtual machines and more modern cloud-native applications built using containers. The overall goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by employing a single platform to run both classes of applications, he added.

Red Hat has been wooing providers of telecommunications services that historically adopted the OpenStack framework to deploy software on top of an open source platform. Many of those providers are now building and deploying a larger number of cloud-native applications alongside legacy applications that they have deployed on virtual machines.

Most telecommunications service providers will be running a mix of cloud native and legacy applications for many years to come. Rather than having to hire and retain two distinct sets of IT professionals to manage the underlying infrastructure needed to run those applications, Red Hat is making a case for unifying the underlying infrastructure using a Kubevirt platform that enables IT teams to encapsulate virtual machines in containers that can then be deployed on Kubernetes clusters.

It’s not clear how many telecommunications providers are adopting the Red Hat OpenShift platform but the overall pace of adoption of cloud-native application development continues to accelerate. A recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey finds that a full 82% work in organizations that are running Kubernetes clusters in production environments. A quarter of respondents (25%) are using cloud-native technologies across all their application development and deployment workflows, while just over a third (34%) are mostly using them.

Obviously, telecommunications providers are hoping many of those applications will be deployed in data centers interconnected by networks they manage. Each organization will need to determine for themselves where best to deploy their applications, but one thing that is for certain is that they will become increasingly distributed across IT infrastructure, running anywhere from the cloud to the network edge.