Red Hat and HCLTech reinvent cloud-native for telecommunications

The telecommunications industry is one of the most competitive as new providers join incumbents to tap into demand for broadband-enabled communications and 24/7 connectivity. Infrastructure developments underpinned by 5G and edge technologies create opportunities for service providers of all sizes to help businesses across all sectors adapt and reinvent. 

In turn, maximizing the capabilities of 5G, edge computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (AI/ML) when creating innovative customer offerings requires service providers to undergo their own transformation. 

Quite simply, legacy IT infrastructure does not offer the agility needed to take full advantage of 5G, edge, and AI/ML, leaving service providers struggling to monetize new business opportunities.

Cloud-native for increased agility

Combining the high speed, low-latency connectivity of 5G with multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloud-native applications offers new opportunities for service providers. For example, cloud-native, container-based technology, and cloud-native network functions can deliver 5G services and applications at a pace service providers require while ensuring that investments in areas such as network function virtualization (NFV) pay for themselves.

Moving to a container-based microservices architecture is foundational to cloud-native development. It brings increased security and scalability, higher reliability, and better integration capabilities than virtual machines (VMs) can deliver in a distributed network.

Container-based microservices also offer greater efficiency for services and operations, including a consolidated view of network and customer data and higher network and business process automation levels. They support innovation and provide service providers with the ability to adapt to changing customer requirements.

Tested and trusted services for bringing applications to market  

Moving workloads into a unified container platform paves the way for designing applications as collections of microservices – the optimal way to build a 5G core, modernize operational support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) workloads, and transform radio access networks (RANs).

Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based container platform that brings together tested and trusted services to ease all aspects of developing, modernizing, deploying, running, and managing applications. It delivers a complete platform for both traditional and cloud-native applications that can run anywhere.

Alan Flower, Executive Vice President – CTO & Global Head, Cloud Native & AI Labs at HCLTech, says: “A key reason that clients adopt Red Hat OpenShift is to benefit from a fast-moving and innovative platform that keeps up with advances in technology and can operate anywhere. There’s also a commercial advantage. Rather than having a multitude of competitive platforms in your organization, standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift brings volume and scale advantages.” 

For many organizations, the question then becomes how fast they can move to Red Hat OpenShift and reduce costs associated with running data centers and multiple, expensive legacy platforms. This is especially relevant when, according to Red Hat's The State of Enterprise Open Source report, in-house skills gaps and a lack of resources continue to be significant roadblocks for undertaking this digital transformation¹ .

To address the issue, Red Hat and HCLTech developed the Kubernetes Migration Platform (KMP), which automates moving legacy container platforms, including IBM Cloud Foundry, VMware Pivotal Cloud Foundry, VMware Tanzu, SUSE Rancher, and IBM Bluemix, to Red Hat OpenShift.

According to Flower, KMP has become a fundamental part of many organizations' digital transformation, massively reducing the cost of migrating cloud-native workloads between platforms to bring them to Red Hat OpenShift. 

Pain-free migration of workloads to Red Hat OpenShift

KMP enables repeatable, cost-effective, highly reliable, and fast migration, reducing set-up time from days to hours and execution times from hours to minutes. As a result, service providers can save nearly 400 hours migrating 100 applications to Red Hat OpenShift, compared with manual processes.

Even if your business uses hybrid, multi-cloud environments built on different Kubernetes-based platforms, like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), HCLTech's KMP can easily move workloads between them all.

“KMP is the easiest way by far for a client to migrate from a competitive platform to Red Hat OpenShift. It is genuinely a fully automated, three-click experience that will move a production workload into Red Hat OpenShift, typically in less than two minutes,” says Alan Flower.  

As well as supporting service providers' migrations of any size and complexity from any legacy container platform, KMP also:

• Simplifies the migration of containerized microservices and applications to just three clicks.
• Migrates stateless and stateful applications, including containerized databases.
• Minimizes downtime and production outages. 
• Discovers workloads and scans for container vulnerabilities.
• Enables service providers to build and run workloads anywhere consistently.
• Accelerates application modernization and adoption of a cloud-native development approach.

HCLTech’s KMP ensures an easy, fast, and reliable migration route to Red Hat OpenShift, with substantial licensing cost savings so that you can focus budgets and resources on application modernization and the transition to cloud-native application development. The platform also offers service providers using IBM Cloud Foundry a migration opportunity to Red Hat OpenShift.

Establish your cloud-native core networks faster

Containers, virtualization, microservices, and automation are redefining the capabilities of telecommunications networks from the core to the edge. By harnessing open source capabilities in 5G and edge technologies, service providers can meet customer demand for greater connectivity while helping industries transform.

It all hinges on adopting the right technology for container orchestration. Standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift and deploying Red Hat OpenShift AI gives service providers an advantage when harnessing advanced technology to launch new services and customer experiences.  

HCLTech's KMP can help you migrate to Red Hat OpenShift more quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal risk, accelerating your journey to becoming a cloud-native, 5G-ready industry leader.

¹ Red Hat report. “The State of Enterprise Open Source: A Red Hat report,” February 22, 2022.