Getting to know Fran Heeran, Vice President, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat

Heeran has over 30 years of experience in the software industry and has spent the past 25 years in the telecom sector. He joins Red Hat to lead the Global Telecommunications organization to accelerate Red Hat’s open source leadership in the telecommunications network environment by closely collaborating with Red Hat’s communities, customers and partners. Heeran will work to scale Red Hat’s telco vision and strategy within the industry and the wider enterprise space. Prior to joining Red Hat, he served in executive technology and business executive roles with several globally renowned organizations - including Nokia, Vodafone Group, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC. Most recently, he led the Core Networks business at Nokia with responsibility for the company’s end-to-end 5G core offerings, as well as Nokia’s Cloud Infrastructure portfolio which was transitioned to Red Hat in 2023. Heeran has also experience working on the service provider segment of the industry and was group head of Cloud & Automation at Vodafone Group from 2017 to 2019 where he led the team defining the strategy and architecture for Vodafone’s Network and IT cloud transformation program. During this time, he also represented Vodafone on the Board of Linux Foundation Networking. 

Red Hat is delighted to welcome Fran Heeran as Vice President of the Global Telecommunications organization. In this role, Heeran will be responsible for accelerating Red Hat’s open source leadership in the telecommunications network environment by closely collaborating with Red Hat’s communities, customers and partners. With more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, he will work to scale Red Hat’s telco vision and strategy within the industry and the wider enterprise space

We caught up with Heeran to hear his perspective on open source and Red Hat, and his experiences and vision for the Red Hat telecommunication business unit. 

What led you to your career in telecommunications and enterprise software and what led you to Red Hat as your next step?

 I have been a software engineer all my career and have worked across a range of different industry sectors. My first encounter with the telecommunications industry was developing software for the first large-scale email and directory (X.500 and LDAP) platforms sold to communication services providers (CSPs). I then worked in other sectors (including the early digital TV broadcasting systems) before coming back to telecommunications at the start of the data revolution (GPRS/WAP) working on charging and messaging systems. It's been incredible to be part of the journey through successive technology generations, witnessing the evolution from monolithic, bare-metal systems to highly scalable and resilient cloud-based solutions. It’s a demanding industry but a very rewarding one, especially being able to work on systems and solutions that are now an essential part of everyone’s day to day life around the world. Red Hat is a company that I have admired for a long time with proven open source solutions and a culture that prioritizes openness and contributions to the community. I’ve worked very closely with Red Hat in the past so I know the team and culture very well. This along with the fantastic opportunities ahead, it made it an easy decision to join.

What is your vision for the telecommunications industry and how will you use your experience to further expand opportunities for Red Hat, our customers and our partners?

There's a massive opportunity in front of us as dynamics within the industry shift. The infrastructure landscape is evolving rapidly with new demands for openness, scale, automation and flexibility. As new, emerging workloads like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (gen AI) gain more traction in the telecommunications and industrial sectors, I’m looking forward to helping Red Hat’s customers develop, launch and operate the most advanced telecommunications solutions built on Red Hat’s incredible portfolio. Another piece of this puzzle will also include our partner ecosystem as a key driver in helping CSPs and manufacturers successfully implement AI at the edge and begin the evolution to future communications technology generations. These demanding deployments are often driven by data pulled from a variety of sources, so it’s critical for organizations to maintain a consistent platform and work across a diverse range of vendors to aggregate and manage data and fuel AI-enabled applications from the datacenter to the cloud and at the farthest edge. Furthermore, the 5G and next-generation 6G landscape presents exciting opportunities for partners to continue to deepen their services and offerings with Red Hat platforms to address evolving RAN, core and supporting services use cases across cloud and virtualized environments for customers. I’m really looking forward to diving into these opportunities with our customers and partners to further build upon Red Hat’s history of customer success. 

What excites you most about this new role?

This role is a real blend of what I have accomplished in my career so far. I have always maintained a strong combination  of skills in what I work on, from technical depth, shaping strategic direction and a very strong focus on the customer. The opportunity to evolve open source technologies together with the Red Hat ecosystem, and to work with the Red Hat team in further enhancing and developing a long term successful strategy to grow Red Hat’s footprint in the telecommunications network environment. Additionally, the opportunity to work with colleagues and friends across the global service provider ecosystem to help shape its future direction is something I am very much looking forward to.

AI is going to play a massive role in the future of networks. What’s most exciting to you and how will open source play a role here?

Interest in gen AI and its potential is growing at an incredible rate and will undoubtedly represent a significant change in how we build and operate solutions in the telecommunications sector. However (like most of the trends we see), we need to get past the huge hype cycle and get to the famous “slope of enlightenment,” focusing on the reality of what represents “true AI” and the clear practical opportunities in front of us. There are incredible opportunities for AI application at every stage of the network and business lifecycle from design, build, operation and commercialisation. While CSPs continue to expand their 5G networks and power the edge for enterprises to consume those capabilities, we’re excited to see emerging technologies start to  play a central role in tomorrow’s network vision. The strength of the Red Hat portfolio, in particular Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI, will support this new evolution for CSPs to face all demands and stay competitive.

Interested in hearing more about topics like AI and the modern network lifecycle? Join us for Open Telco 2024, an online event hosted by Red Hat on November 19th, 2024, where industry leaders, ecosystem partners and analysts will share their key learnings and insights on all things AI, autonomous networks, open source, open RAN and more.